I may be new in the business of lawyering and may not understand a lot about the administration and how the key players in the system work together to achieve the expected justice that the world expects. I may not be writing to question what determines justice, but I would want to know how much Judges contribute to the justice that we have -"judges discretion".
Each day, I wake up knowing that I would have to do what I have to do to ensure that the wheels of justice keep grinding, and to the best of my ability, those who deserve to be punished, get punished for their deeds. And those who deserve to be free are not kept behind bars for no just cause, no matter how affluent or influential they are, or how indigent they seem. I always loathed in competent lawyers because their incompetence could cost someone his life and freedom even when he doesn't deserve it. I still understood that people in desperate positions could do anything to hold on to hope at all cost, and whether the players in the field of social exchange liked it or not, there were always going to be persons who would always break the rules.
On Friday 3rd May 2013, I was privileged to be in a sitting in the hearing of a matter involving the NDLEA and a drug peddler, who was trafficking a large quantity of hard drugs to Kenya from Nigeria. The accused was a female, and she had stuffed a large quantity of meta-morphine in her private part, and was discovered by men of the NDLEA on routine search at the departure terminal of the Murtala Mohammed International Airport, an offence carrying a term of life imprisonment upon conviction.
Since her arrest in July 2012, the accused has been in custody at the NDLEA detention centre awaiting trial. She was finally arraigned on the 3rd of the May,2013 and after taking plea- wherein she pleaded guilty. I guess at that moment the future looked bleak and hopeless, because she was in tears. Everyone felt pity for her, and more after she stated she was transporting it for someone, and she was to be paid a paltry sum of N45,000. Although I thought she was lying, I still felt pity for her predicament and for her five children who may be without their mother for the rest of their lives, if she was sentenced to the full term according to the punishment section of the law.
This feeling haunted me for a few more moments until the long awaited moment arrived- the Judge's ruling.
After summarizing the whole evidence against the accused, the judge proceeded to sentence her to 11 months in prison, starting from the day of arrest and terminating on the day of her ruling. A fair judgment I presume. Not for me sha! To me this was a chance for the courts to use the various tools at its disposal to bring sanity to a system under a keen management of the accused an assert control over the social vandals and opportunists such as the accused.
It was at that point that it hit me. It was either this, or incarceration without reformation. A sentence to oblivion of a productive citizen. It could be infliction of death worse than firing squad. Death by mental torture and being skinned alive.
If this woman was not shown such level of leniency, and she eventually ended up with the full term according to law, she would have had to deal with being held in a facility with the least preparedness for housing people needing reformation. Poor sanitation, hygiene, and the lowest boost of her productivity she would have ever experienced in her lifetime.This is because we do not treat ourselves like animals. We hate to be behind, so we treat everyone like competition. We are blinded by greed, so we starve even the ones that are put under our care, and get obese on every ones supply, while they slump and die at our corridors. If the judge did not extend this hand of leniency, the woman would have been another lost man-power resource that explains how bad it has gotten.
Back to the big picture, with such a sympathetic scenario in front of you, if you were a judge and a drug dealer reached you on the phone to negotiate the fate of such a lady and "dangled a carrot" in front of you. What would your discretion be? Justice according to the law you swore to defend or Justice according to your own conscience and what it serves personally? Our failed system is eating every thing down like cancer worm, lets build our system to serve our collective needs.
if we had a corrective system where the administrators of our political estate had an agenda for our development, we wont have to bend the rules so much. We are all judges and each day we judge the encounters that we come across. Lets build a system where fairness can be the watchword. Where we would recognise that there is a lot for us all and there is a direction that makes us successful people. SUCCESS IN UNITY, PEACE, ECONOMIC PROGRESS AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT.
We can have better health care facilities, social amenities, jobs and a dependable future for all, that is the way forward.
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