crime and sentencing

A 27-year-old man, Abiodun Ismaila, was recently sentenced to six years imprisonment with hard labour by an Osogbo Magistrates’ Court. The alternative offered him was the payment of N100,000 fine. According to the prosecution, Ismaila broke into the residence of one Aloba Oluwasheun at Dada Estate in Osogbo and from there stole a bag containing sundry items. The contents of the bag were listed as two pairs of shoes, a wristwatch, one foot of canvas shoes and some documents. All the items were valued at N21,000. The prosecution further told the court that Ismaila thought the bag contained money.

NOT too long ago, a report from Benue State said a man who stole some tubers of yam was sentenced to seven years imprisonment. Another report which came from Akure was on a man who stole a pot of soup. He also bagged a lengthy jail term for his desperation to assuage his hunger. There have been many other cases of petty larceny which have attracted outrageously disproportionate punishments.

IN the same country and under the same legal system, the immediate past Inspector General of Police, Mr. Tafa Balogun, to whom billions of naira in ill-gotten wealth was traced, received just a slap on the wrist. He spent only a few months in prison. This apparently contradicting notion of justice leaves the ordinary man baffled and bewildered. It creates the impression that the rich and the poor are governed by different versions of the same law.

THE law courts exist to dispense justice. Inherent in the principle of justice is the quality of fairness and reasonableness, the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims and the assignment of merited rewards or punishments. The question that logically arises is: What manner of justice is being dispensed in a situation in which petty thieves receive life-shattering sentences while the big rogues are treated with kid gloves?

THE prison yard is, indeed, a penal institution but its ultimate objective is to reform and not to ruin the prisoner. In Nigeria, however, the jail house has become a veritable breeding ground for ruthless gangsters. There are many people who have found themselves in prison as a result of proven or unproven cases of theft involving property of little monetary value. During their usually long periods of incarceration, they come in contact with and get polluted by the hardened criminals. On their discharge from prison, they walk into the warm embrace of chieftains of the underworld, filled with rage and swearing vengeance on society because they see themselves as victims of societal injustice.

THE law normally prescribes a range of punishments — from the heaviest to the lightest — for each offence. This leaves the judge with the responsibility of using his discretion to determine the appropriate punishment to be meted out to a convicted person. In the exercise of this discretion, the judge takes due cognisance of the circumstances surrounding the commission of the crime. When an accused person is convicted of a grievous crime, the defence counsel pleads for the mitigation of the severity of punishment. He wants the judge to exercise this discretion in favour of his client. When, on the other hand, an accused is found guilty of a petty crime, what are those aggravating circumstances that could warrant the imposition of a disproportionate punishment that is capable of undermining the very essence of justice?

NIGERIA is a docile society in which so many people do not know their rights. A rather pathetic dimension is that only a negligible percentage of those who know are prepared to stand up for such rights. This is why people spend years behind bars awaiting trial for offences that would have attracted imprisonment for a few months at the most. The victims of this societal injustices are always the underprivileged. The privileged ones are in position to buy justice and choose the law they want to obey or ignore.

THE gale of impeachments that swept across the country in 2005 and 2006 has been quite instructive. Honour and integrity have always been taken for granted as qualities that are inherent in anybody that is involved in the dispensation of justice. The brazen manner in which some judicial officers ignored the provisions of the constitution and played along with politicians showed clearly that not all judges care a hoot about these attributes.

BUT for the restorative decisions at the highest levels of the judiciary, the image of the bench would have been completely battered in Nigeria, today. If judges on the higher bench could serve as facilitators of unconstitutional impeachments, the pronouncement of outlandish judgments by their junior colleagues on the lower bench should not be a surprise.

SO much has been said but very little has so far been done about the reform of the country’s laws. And commendable as the cleansing of the judiciary is, the fact remains that it has been an ad hoc affair. A thorough-going reform of Nigerian laws is long overdue. One of the objectives of the exercise should be the review of laws that offer the latitude for outrageous sentencing. And to ensure that the courts dispense justice rather than favour and unmerited punishment, the cleansing of the judiciary should be carried to a logical conclusion.