The Verdict By Olusegun Adeniyi. Email,
olusegun.adeniyi@thisdaylive.com
“The Don often quoted the saying, ‘Rather a hundred guilty
men go free than one innocent man be punished,’ then added, ‘What a beautiful
country.’”
The foregoing is taken from Mario Puzo’s novel, “The Last
Don”, the gripping sequel to his classic, “The Godfather”. In that short
narrative, Don Domenico Clericuzio was mocking the American justice system he
took maximum advantage of to amass enormous wealth and power, while living
above the law. Yet it is within the context of his sarcasm that one can easily
situate the controversy currently trailing the acquittal last week of Major
Hamza Al Mustapha and Alhaji Lateef Shofolahan, in the murder trial of Mrs
Kudirat Olayinka Abiola.
Having followed the case very closely from the beginning,
including all the contrived drama that for several years rendered prosecution
almost impossible, I sympathise with members of the Abiola family who now have
to relive the painful memories of Kudirat’s gruesome assassination. In a
statement last weekend, titled “Is This The Face of Justice in Nigeria?”, the
Kudirat Initiative for Democracy (KIND), founded by Mrs Hafsat Abiola-Costello,
argued that the upturned verdict of the Lagos High Court which convicted Major
Hamza Al Mustpaha and Alhaji Lateef Shofolahan, was credible, regardless of the
fact that during cross examination and re-examination, the two principal
witnesses retracted their earlier testimony.
Said KIND: “...The court found that it was cogently,
compellingly and irresistibly proven beyond reasonable doubt by the prosecution
that Major Al Mustapha was the person who procured Barnabas Jabila (aka
Sergeant Rogers) to eliminate Alhaja Abiola by direct instruction, handing over
of the murder weapon, the UZI SMG with 9mm rounds with which she was
assassinated in broad daylight on the streets of Lagos and who provided ‘the
logistics’ for their movement from Abuja to Lagos by flight, their
accommodation at his Lagos official residence at Dodan Barracks and linked them
up with their contact person and facilitator, Alhaji Lateef Shofolahan.”
Not a few people share the sentiment expressed by KIND that
the Lagos High Court actually convicted the people responsible for Kudirat’s
assassination. However, nobody can also deny the fact that this has been one
unusual prosecution that could only have ended the way it did. The point being
made here is that the course of justice is already perverted when an accused
has to stand trial for almost one and a half decades (even if in this instance,
he was responsible for that); and it worsens matters if in the process of that
protracted trial, the prosecution witnesses began to change their narratives.
What that does is to create doubts, which in criminal prosecution could only be
resolved in favour of the accused, as the appeal court did in this unfortunate
trial.
If there is anything that reinforces the difficulty of
bringing high-profile killers to book under a system of law, it is the United
States trial of George Zimmerman over the murder of an unarmed black teenager,
Trayvon Martin, which last Saturday ended in acquittal even when there was no
dispute as to who pulled the fatal trigger. The doubt the Florida jury resolved
in favour of the shooter of a harmless teenager was that he acted in
“self-defense”.
Quite naturally the verdict sparked outrage but on Monday,
President Barack Obama waded in and I commend part of what he said to those who
feel hurt about al-Mustapha’s acquittal. Said Obama: “I know this case has
elicited strong passions. And in the wake of the verdict, I know those passions
may be running even higher. But we are a nation of laws, and a jury has
spoken…we should ask ourselves if we’re doing all we can to widen the circle of
compassion and understanding in our own communities. We should ask ourselves,
as individuals and as a society, how we can prevent future tragedies like
this…”
For me, there are two take-aways from Obama’s intervention,
especially in the light of what has transpired in the last one week in our
country. One, with al-Mustapha now being treated like a Nollywood star in Kano,
there seems to be no compassion for the Abiola family and a lack of
appreciation of the fact that a woman was brutally hacked down in her prime and
in broad daylight. Whatever the motivation for the gloating that is going on in
some quarters, it cannot be right. Two, if we accept al-Mustapha’s position
that he was not responsible for Kudirat’s death, it is also a notorious fact that
the terror machine he presided over at the time created the atmosphere for her
murder. What therefore flows from that is a timely warning for us all,
especially at a time like this when our democracy is going through some
convulsion, that never must we allow our nation to experience such brutal
dictatorship again.
On Monday ‘The Economist’ magazine published a piece on the
Florida trial titled, “Getting Away With It”, where the lead writer stated: “I
seriously doubt Mr Zimmerman needed to shoot Mr Martin, even if Mr Martin did
attack him. And I seriously doubt Mr Martin would have been shot if he hadn’t
been a black kid. In my heart of hearts, I too think Mr Zimmerman did something
terribly wrong”. Yet the conclusion from that damning summation is that considering
the unpleasant reality “that the least privileged, the most oppressed, the most
discriminated against, are far and away most likely to stand accused” for
murder (there is ample evidence of that in our country) “a legal system making
it harder for the likes of Mr Zimmerman to get away with it would be a system
of even more outrageous racial inequity.”
Such a conclusion may sound hypocritical, if not out-rightly
silly, to some people but it is not. The message there is that since one can
never really be 100 percent certain in murder trials, especially in cases like
Al-Mustapha’s where the core evidence is the testimony of some unstable
witnesses who should now face trial for perjury; and given the unpleasant
reality that murder charges are mostly preferred against the poor and the weak,
the society is better served if the doubt is resolved on the side of the
accused, no matter what we may think of such characters.
However, it is a serious indictment on our criminal justice
administration that the Court of Appeal would dismiss Kudirat’s homicide
investigation as shoddy. Against the background that the brutal assassinations
of Dele Giwa, Bola Ige, Alfred Rewane, Bagauda Kaltho, Funso Williams, Sulia
Adedeji, Bisoye Tejuosho, Harry Marshal et. al. ended in similar cul de sac,
some without any prosecution, we should all be worried. If there is any
enduring lesson that history teaches, it is that a society which gives free
reign to this kind of morbid impunity is greatly imperiled.st and you are doing
so because it is a safety requirement,” the Minister said.
When an operator refuses to declare of its flights he is
penalised and if he consistently flouts the policy his operations would be
grounded, so declared the minister.
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