By Sola Ogundipe
FIFTEEN capital defense lawyers from six states of the Federation have been imparted with skills to defend persons facing the death penalty, even as the Federal government has been charged to implement provisions of the Revised Correctional Act of Nigeria, that allow death sentences to be commuted to life imprisonment for persons who have been on death row for more than 10 years.
At the training, organised in Lagos by Avocats Sans Frontieres France, ASF, in partnership with the Makwayane Institute Nigeria Alumrni, the Country Director, ASF France, Mrs Angela Uzoma-Iwuchukwu, explained that a few of the Fellows from the Nigerian alumni of the Makwanaye Institute housed in the Cornell University in New York, came together to train the defense lawyers.
Uzoma-Iwuchukwu who spoke during the training themed: “Effective Representation of Persons facing the Death Penalty”, said that the justice system should be geared towards restorative justice, rather than punitive justice.
“This is very important because capital defense lawyers play a key role in deciding the outcome of cases of persons who are facing the death penalty. We see a positive movement in Africa in many countries that have done away with the death penalty.
“In Nigeria where the death penalty continues to be legal, while we work towards gradual abolition, we believe that lawyers have a key role to play in effectively defending their clients who are facing the death penalty. This is going to inform the outcomes of whether their clients will end up on death row, or will be allowed to walk.”
On the training, she said the ASF was bringing expertise from the Fellowship in the US in collaboration with Nigerian lawyers representing persons facing the death penalty.
“We are supporting these lawyers with technical expertise to be able to better represent their clients who are facing the death penalty. And with this, we believe we are going to be improving the system, we want to work towards reducing the number of persons who end up on death row through effective legal representation.
“Currently, we have over 3,000 persons on death row in Nigeria, this represents the highest number of persons on death row in sub-Saharan Africa and it should get all of us worried.
“Nigeria is one of the countries in the world with a mandatory death penalty regime. Even in that context, we are bringing new techniques to the lawyers such as mitigating the death penalty regime, we are bringing new skills in interviewing clients to be able to have maximum information to better represent them.”
The Country Director said ASF is encouraging lawyers to work together with prosecutors and the judiciary where cases could have a reviewed from murder to manslaughter so that the mandatory death penalty does not apply.
“We are also bringing to them the use of experts particularly experts from the medical field who will be supporting them, for lawyers to work with medical experts to prove their clients’ case, not only to prove innocence but also mental health as a mitigating circumstance.”
Uzoma-Iwuchukwu said ASF is working with the lawyers on a strategic litigation project to challenge the mandatory nature of the death penalty in Nigeria.
“That will be one of the outcomes of this training session. This has been successfully challenged in Uganda and Malawi. We do not believe that any country or government should have the right to take away anybody’s life because that is a violation of the right to life which is guaranteed under the Nigerian Constitution, the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights, and also other international human rights instruments that Nigeria is a signatory to.
“We call on the Nigerian government to begin to implement the section of the revised correctional Act of Nigeria which says that when persons have stayed for more than 10 years on death row, their death sentences could be commuted to other terms of imprisonment.
“We are also calling on the Federal Government to begin to consider reviewing the instance of the death penalty looking at what is going on in other African countries including in Ghana where their parliament has just abolished the death penalty.”
Also speaking, an Associate Professor of the Faculty of Law, University of Lagos, Dr Dr Abiodun Odusote argued in order to establish a relationship, lawyers need to gain the trust of their clients. He argued that there was a noticeable gap in the legal representation for awaiting inmates.
“What we observed is that we have a lot of awaiting trial inmates and that should not be the case, one of the reasons for this is that we do not have effective legal representation for these awaiting inmates.
“We also discovered that counsel that represents the accused people facing the pronouncement of the death penalty is most of the time new wigs, youth corps members, and juniors in the law offices, so it is our belief that we should equip legal counsel with the tools they need to put up effective legal representation for people facing pronouncement of the death penalty.
“At the end of the training we hope that we would have given them the tools that they need to put up sound representation,” Odusote remarked.
Lawyers who participated in the workshop were drawn from Kano, Rivers, Lagos, Enugu, and Ebonyi states.
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