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All of these individuals would not have received justice without our intervention due to the request of the Legal Aid Council. Legal Aid Council is an institution responsible for providing defense lawyers in matters involving life and liberty. However, because they’re so poorly funded, they have to rely on rookie lawyers straight out of law school doing a year of compulsory national service. In Joy’s case, I think there must have been at least twenty different advocates involved at the trial level so you can imagine that file just being passed from hand to hand; no one’s taking the time or trouble to get to the bottom of the facts.
The autopsy reports were not before the court. And yet, she was convicted of murder because she had such poor repre- sentation at the trial court level. So anyway, we took it on and the appeal succeeded.
She called me a few days later to inform me she had been assigned 16,000 cases; all of which were new to her as she was not the trial judge or involved before in earlier stages of the cases before they were assigned to her.
In Lagos State, my primary place of work, which is a meg- acity with a population in excess of twenty million – closer to twenty-five million now because of the eternally dis- placed persons moving south as refugees from the frequent terrorist attacks in the northern part of the country and neighboring countries - we have less than seventeen judges of the superior court of record, known as the state high court. So it takes a lot of time to take a claim from filing of pleadings, to trial, and judgment.
Pre-COVID, late in December 2019, I requested the sta- tistics from the Supreme Court of Nigeria. The number of judgments in the last quarter of that year was over 500. By comparison in the same period, the Supreme Court of England and Wales delivered 19 judgments or thereabouts. That’s to say our judges are overworked and underpaid. Needless to say, this level of work will sometimes impact the quality of judicial pronouncement from time to time.
There’s much to do but we are a very young country. We’re but sixty years old, and I’m optimistic as I leave you with the African saying, which we will apply to trials in Nigeria. The saying goes, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”
Tom Tongue Portland, OR
As trial lawyers in Nigeria, we have to do what we can. We concentrate our defense intervention on the areas where we feel we can make the most impact, so appeals, such as Joy’s, and work with the Ministry of Justice, which is al- most equally underfunded, to prosecute cases.
To give you further insight, I’ll close with some statistics. The Ministry of Justice in Oyo State, where I prosecuted the rape case I referred to earlier, had at the time fifty-one lawyers dealing with over 5,000 criminal prosecutions. Over 1,000 of those defendants were in custody awaiting trial and had been in custody for periods of up to ten years. About fifteen years ago, a girlfriend of mine was elevated to the bench of a high court in one of the states of Nigeria.
60
YEARS
WINTER 2023
JOURNAL 38