Plea Bargain is Dubious — CJN

Chief Justice of Nigeria, CJN, Justice Dahiru Musdapher Tuesday in Abuja, faulted the concept of plea bargaining employed by the Attorney-General of the Federation, AGF and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, noting that it is a novel concept of dubious origin invented to provide soft landing to high profile criminals who loot the treasury entrusted to them.

Justice Musdapher stated this in a speech delivered at the 5th annual conference of the Section on Legal Practice, SLP, of the Nigerian Bar Association, NBA.

The CJN who was represented by Justice Nwali Sylvester Ngwuta of the Supreme Court, observed that the system of plea bargain has no place in our law whether substantive or procedural.

According to him “it was invented to provide soft landing to high profile criminals who loot the treasury entrusted to them. It is an obstacle to our fight against corruption and should never again be mentioned in our jurisprudence.

On the use of injunctions against law enforcement agents to avoid arrests, the CJN stated that the guilty are afraid and that when a man who has abused the public trust reposed in him feels the heat of the approaching long arm of the law he rushes to a judge with flexible conscience who makes him untouchable to the law enforcement agents.

“It is another obstacle to the struggle to uproot corruption in this country,” he added.

He called on legal practitioners to regard it as part of their inestimable service to the country to take a position on the above issues which constitute a blot on our criminal process. “Your voice should be heard for change to be made for the better of our country,” he charged the lawyers.

Reacting to the state of the nation’s prisons, Musdapher pointed out the situation in the nation’s prisons where fellow human beings are reduced to the barest level of humanity.

“I think the time is ripe to include a provision for suspended sentence in the Criminal Procedure Code and Criminal Procedure Law, after all, as Roscoe Pound said in his introduction to the philosophy of law (1922), the law must be stable but it must not stand still.”

On the issue of holden charges, the Chief Justice noted that every legal practitioner is familiar with this term by which citizens are dumped in prison by a court which lacks jurisdiction to try them. It is largely responsibile for the congestion in prisons across the country.

“The state cannot incarcerate its citizens while scrambling for evidence to build a case against him, and if it has a case it should take the accused to a court of competent jurisdiction. As often in the case when he is set free because he has no case to answer he goes home in shame, a damaged man, without apology, without compensation.”

Also speaking at the occasion, the NBA President, Joseph Bodurin Daudu, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, lamented the lack of interest showed by junior lawyers to the conference noting that “the topic of this conference is apt as it borders on litigation and legal practice and would have been of immense benefit to junior lawyers but due to their short sighted approach to issues of legal education.

“People must learn to take advantage of specialization in the legal practice because the more specialized you are the more comfortably you will live.

Looked at from the population of the bar, it will be to our advantage that we embrace specialization. The Bar must reform and not just criticize others,” he added.

— Nnamdi Felix/Abuja