The law is an ass, the saying goes. But there is a school of thought which believes that it is the judge who is the ass and not the law.
Better still, to those on the conservative divide, they refer to our courts as courts of justice but to some discernible members of the liberal
pedigree, it should be called courts of law and not court of justice.
This school of thought believes that people do not receive justice in the
courts but application of law without justice.
Falling back on empirical examples which are legion, one cannot blame those who draw this thin line of distinction between law and justice.
Judges, being human beings, are susceptible to human frailties, foibles and follies like other mortal beings.
Those who thought of setting up courts as arena for adjudication of disputes seemed to realise this by making provision for an in-built
appellate mechanism to test or challenge what could have been perceived as faulty decisions at courts of first instance.
Prior to our 1963 Republican constitution, appeals from our then Federal Supreme Court, ended at the privy council. But since 1963 when Nigeria attained the Republican status, all appeals ended at the Supreme Court. It is normal for whoever lost a contentious litigation at the Supreme Court to sulk but what can be done at that level is to subject such judgments to intellectual academic exercise.
As l earlier posited, judges, as human beings are susceptible to making mistakes and it’s not peculiar to our clime.
Take the case of the “Birmingham Six”, who were found guilty by a British court and sentenced to life imprisonment for allegedly bombing two Birmingham pubs in 1974 which resulted in the death of 21 people.
Early in 1991, an appellate court set them free after 16 years in prison, having been found that they had no hand in the bombing.
In Nigeria, there was the chilling case of Messrs Clement Onyewuenyi and James Ibeawuchi, both from Imo State. Both were arrested on July 8, 1977 for alleged armed robbery. First, they appeared before a Robbery and Firearms Tribunal but when the civilian government took over in 1979, their case was transferred to a High Court.
Justice G. Ojiako in June 1983 sent them into the yawning chasm of death. But because they were convicted at the High Court, they quickly
lodged an appeal at the Court of Appeal which on December 7, 1990, quashed their death sentences and set them free, after 13 years in the death chambers!
Messrs Onyowuenyi and Ibeawuchi were lucky because they were condemned to death by a High Court and not by a tribunal which had no
room for appeal.
The case of former Naval Officer, Sub-Lieutenant Williams Alders Oyazimo also vividly comes to mind. The former Naval Officer got the balloon of his promising career deflated at its prime when he and Joseph Ilobo, a trader were both arraigned before a Robbery and Firearms Tribunal for robbing one Alhaji Taibatu Opene of a record player and
loud speakers. They were condemned to death on April 8, 1971. They were publicly executed on Saturday, April 24, 1971 along with
Babatunde Folorunso, in what was the first public execution in Nigeria.
It is however instructive to know that up to his point of death, the former Naval Officer proclaimed his innocence and his execution generated a lot of heat at that time and his children till date, still proclaim their
father’s innocence.
That leaves us with the human beings that decide the cases. Judges do play God and in fact, they are next to God here on this planet because they can decide if someone would live or die.
However, in political cases, it is quite disturbing how politicians have tried to destroy the Supreme Court with various applications for the court to review its judgment. That is an affront to the finality of the Supreme Court. There has to be an end to litigations. These applications, to me, constitute an abuse of court process and the Supreme Court must be firm in steming this dangerous tide.
In 2016, the Supreme Court under the then acting Chief Justice Onnoghen, slammed a N9million punitive cost against a Senior Advocate representing the then Ali Modu Sheriff-led faction of the PDP over some frivolous motions against the justices.
I hope the Supreme Court won’t stand idly and watch its integrity dragged in the mud by politicians who would not accept the finality of its verdicts.
-Richard Akinnola
