Lessons from Prison 2

I recently gave my account of being falsely arrested and jailed.

I am convinced that God allowed that to open our eyes to some things we have always assumed are fine.

I want us to today look at the judicial system.

I think the judiciary is the nerve center of our corruption. Probably its existence is the reason corruption is so rife. And I will use my small experience to demonstrate.

How do you come to court thirty minutes to closing time and you are supposed to determine the ‘destinies’ of over two hundred people?

Why do you make innocence so costly? Why must someone be remanded in prison for a petty offense, or for even producing evidence to refute the accusation?

Why can’t someone pay his own fine? Why must someone from outside have to pay the fine even if he has to get the money from the convict?

I ask this because we went to prison with some young men who had given their fine money to someone who disappeared with it. And there are many who rot in prison because they are strangers or even visitors with nobody who can afford time to free them. Others get ‘lost’ and so more or less disappear and nobody who knows them can trace them.

I was told of this jailed girl from a wealthy family who was able to trace her family when she fell sick and was admitted to hospital. A caregiver who was herself detained for being unable to pay her hospital bill broke the law and was almost jailed herself when she talked to her but was able to contact her family.

They came, paid whatever needed to be paid by the justice system and transferred her to a hospital befitting their status. She was in prison and her wealthy family was not even aware of her whereabouts!

Why must the fine be paid through a bank? Why do they not use mobile money yet M-Pesa is used for paying and buying everything nowadays?

The magistrate starts judging very close to closing time knowing that the banks will close before the last person is condemned. Is that not the easiest way to ensure the some people will spend the night in prison? Or could it all be on purpose?

Why send petty ‘criminals’ to prison in the first place? Would community service not suffice?

Yet we have wealthy criminals who buy their freedom through paying preemptive bonds to stop the law from touching them. Others will stretch their cases for years through adjournments and other legal acrobatics.

Mass produced justice is injustice. You cannot give an accused thirty seconds or less between the accusation being read by the prosecutor to the time you sentence them and still be fair. It is impossible to even consider anything before passing that sentence. And it is even worse when you criminalise the ‘wastage’ of your time when the accused seeks to explain their position like I saw. Mass produced justice is just like mob justice, only that the shoe has changed feet.

I strongly feel that before a magistrate or judge is hired, they are taken to prison for at least a week to be able to appreciate what they are doing to people when they sentence them without much thought. Even lawyers and arresting officers ought to go through the same for the same reason.

Another thing I think is important is to get to know the circumstances the alleged crime was committed. And I am not talking about murder or robbery as many times the cases are not as rushed and one is even offered a government hired advocate if they do not have one as a last resort; though I do not know whether it is practiced outside the statute books. But even with those we know of people who have been in prison for unending years trying to prove their innocence.

A person buys a sweet and drops the wrapper. He is arrested for dumping. Was there any trash can (dust bin) around that place? Does the responsibility for cleanliness lie only on the pedestrian? Is it not the responsibility of the government to provide bins for such litter?

Someone has continence issues. He is pressed and pees (urinates) on a fence and is arrested. Yet there were no toilets, public or otherwise, in the vicinity. Was he supposed to soil himself? Would he then not have been arrested for another offense? Whose responsibility is it to provide public toilets? What happens if one has no money to pay for them?

Every chief justice makes reducing the case backlog his priority. Is that even remotely possible if petty cases continue clogging the courts? Is mass judging the solution? Why not remove all the petty cases from the courts and look for another avenue for resolving them?

Are we by using so much of our time and resources on petty cases providing illegal money to the arresting officers as they must be bribed not to arrest those they are illegally arresting? Or are the courts not aware that they are brought the few who either refuse to bribe or have no money for the same?

Another thing I must mention is legal education. Does the person being judged know his rights and responsibilities? Does he understand what is being read to him? Does he know the implications of his ‘crime’?

Again I remember some people we slept in prison together who had been given a free bond. Why should someone who is free go to jail?

Others in the rush of the proceedings did not even know what they were fined. I remember one who heard two thousand shillings when the fine was actually two hundred.

But that must happen when justice is rushed like a stolen car.

Let me use statistics. Mine was a criminal case and its number was close to 11 000 of 2018. It therefore means that since January, that court has handled close to 11 000 new criminal cases.

For ease of computation I want us to assume that there were no cases carried over from past years, no other types of cases like civil or commercial and there was no case that was heard more than once or adjourned.

One year has 260 working days. Allowing for public holidays and a few other unavoidable breaks, let us remove 20 days and we are left with 240 days. Now, I was criminalized in the middle of the year. It therefore means that these cases were all in the first half of 2018.

Assuming also that the magistrate is in court half of the day and the other is writing judgments and that they don’t come at 4 like the one who handled us when we were brought before 11.

We have 11000 divide 120x4 which comes to 22.92 cases per hour or 2.6 minutes per case. And that is from the time your case is read to the time you are sentenced. And remember we first made wrong assumptions for the sake of being able to compute. For example, a friend was in that court for over three years after being framed and refusing to talk nicely. And anybody who presented evidence against their crime was remanded for two weeks for their case could then be heard.

If justice has to flow like grease, leave alone water, petty crimes must be removed from the court system. Or better still, arresting officers must stop using arrests as a means of looking for relevance and an extra coin. We should hang our heads in shame if after handling that number of criminal cases in a year we still have criminals.

If one single court handles over 20 000 criminal cases in one year, what are the implications? Does it mean we are so criminally minded that every other person is a criminal? And we know that more criminals bribed their way so that they are not taken to court.

Again, how will you know the real criminal if you spend less than a minute in a case?

The way I have known court proceedings is that what convicts a person is the evidence presented. That even a written confession admitting guilt is not enough if the evidence is not water tight.

I remember a case where a murderer was acquitted though he had admitted to the charges. The reason was that the police became complacent when he admitted to the crime that they forgot to bind up all the ends of the case.

Yet why is evidence not a requirement in petty cases and cases involving the county government? Do they follow different statute books? Or are rules for the same different from those of other courts?

Is the court not then part of the problem instead of the solution?

I am writing is as a layman in the legal jungle. But I am also a minister of the Gospel.

And I will give a spiritual parallel.

Do you know these pastors who are the main persons around ‘their’ church or ministry that they emasculate any upcoming gifts and callings around them? They are the all in all concerning ministry in their turf and so are preeminent in everything from counseling to prayer to wisdom.

They are the senior-most persons; from senior pastor to senior bishop to senior papa or mama with everybody else as subjects and ministry opportunities.

Do you realize that the most damaging spiritual abuse is from these ministers, even more than adulterous and stealing ones? Why?

They are packed to the rafters with ‘ministry’. You must have an appointment to see them due to that. And sometimes the appointment may take months to happen. And then one realizes that they have only a few minutes to meet with them!

Imagine that your marriage is breaking and the pastor gives you ten minutes to be able to resolve issues? Your heart is bleeding that you need to pour it to your pastor. Then you realize that he can only afford you ten minutes? And it is because in his misguided self-importance he has refused to release ‘his’ church and members into ministering to one another. And this so that he can comfortably eat the top cream of the offerings without anybody else having any grounds to question it.

Interestingly, they surround themselves with loyalists who see any evil in their irrelevance in ministry from all that busyness. Incidentally, they are the ones most hurt when their turn to receive ministry comes, some being so disgusted that they leave those churches.

Do you know these ministers who are liars not because they choose to lie but due to their overlapping and overwhelming schedules? They will commit to so many things until they realize that they are not lords over time or that time is under their authority.

There are ministers I love yet will never look for them for whatever reason. The only time I know I will see them is when they are in need of my ministry because then they have no other option. There are some who have rescheduled meetings so often that we forget when we started the drama or what we were to meet for in the first place.