Yemi Okulaja, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and private legal practitioner of over four decades, in this interview with Senior Correspondent, ONYEWUCHI OJINNAKA, bares his mind on retention of death penalty in the criminal justice system, crises in Rivers State Judiciary, implementation of national conference recommendations, among other issues.
Most countries have discarded capital punishment (death penalty) and, instead, uphold life imprisonment. But here in Nigeria, death sentence still exists. Can you reconcile the two divides?
In America and China, they still kill. All our laws are taken from the holy books. You can always trace the origin of all the laws we have from the Bible. So, if you kill, you should be able to pay the penalty. You have deprived a man of his life, so why must your life be saved? But, over time, we have had human rights activists, and they have been the one coming out with all these modifications. In America, it is on state by state basis; if you go to a state like Texas, once you commit a crime and you are sentenced and on the death row, you will eventually be killed. I believe death penalty should be allowed to stay because this punishment is to serve as a deterrent; so that when you know that you stand the risk of losing your life, you will sit up, especially in our country where impunity has been institutionalised. I believe death penalty should still be part of our law. Justice is not a one-way traffic. If a man kills and human rights activists are saying he should not be killed, we should look at justice to the victim too.
The Rivers State judiciary has not been active due to the crisis over appointment of the state’s Chief Judge last year. As a member of Inner Bar, what is your position on the issue and resolution to it?
Well it is quite unfortunate that the whole thing has been politicised. Right from the time of the colonial government, we have a system in place whereby it is the most senior judge that will be appointed as the Chief Judge of a state, and that has always been the case. A judge is not under compulsion to have a degree in Management, because we are not businessmen. So, whoever finds himself as the most senior judge will be appointed as the Chief Judge because our profession operates mostly on seniority? In fact, if two lawyers are called to the Bar the same day, you must be able to determine who is the most senior among them. We are called to bar alphabetically, so if my name starts from A, automatically I will be a senior to anybody whose name starts with B or C. So also if you are called to the Bench, you must be able to determine who is the most senior, that is how our profession operates.
But, things started collapsing when the soldiers began to stage coups, when soldiers started coming into government and that is what has brought us to the situation we have in Rivers State. When the soldiers took over, they did not feel obliged to follow the system, so they started appointing their cronies into the Bench. They started taking a number four judge to be the Chief Judge and that started causing problems in the system. Now, it seems we have accepted it as precedence, that you can take somebody who is not number one to be the Chief Judge. My take is that Justice (Peter) Agumagu was the most senior judge. Although he was redeployed to the Customary Court of Appeal, he still maintains his seniority. The fact that he was redeployed does not mean he has lost his seniority. I believe Agumagu should be the Chief Judge of Rivers State.
A book to keep record of serial rapists has been opened by Lagos State government. How do you see the development?
It is okay if it is not just to create a black book and use it for some other purposes than what it is meant for. This is because in other civilised countries, when you are convicted of rape, there is legal provision that they should make your identity known in the area where you settle, so that people will know that the man is a threat to young women in the neighbourhood. This will prevent him from having another opportunity because rape is almost an offence of opportunity. I cannot rape somebody who is in Ibadan; I can only rape people who are very close to me. You will see all these young men inviting girls into their rooms, or maybe if they (girls) are left alone in the house with the rapist and then he would attack. In fact, people in Britain, America and more organised countries have even gone beyond that. They would make sure that all the people in the area, as well as social workers, are aware because once you are a rapist, the chances that you will repeat that offence is there. So, the government has the duty to protect the society. Somebody who has committed an offence has lost the right to be treated as a normal human being.
Do you think retired judges should handle election petitions?
There is nothing wrong with that. I believe we have a large crop of retired judges who, although, are retired but are still mentally active and can handle this election petitions. This is because the court system is over-burdened by strenuous matters that will cause delay. For instance, if you take a judge to go and serve on the panel of an election petition, what will happen to all the cases assigned to him? It happened to me in Oyo State, where the judge before whom I had a case that was about 14 years old was called to sit on the panel of judges on election petition matters. I had to wait for her to come back, and that was an additional two years to the number of years the case had been in court. That is why I believe we should make use of retired judges. Judges retire at the age of 65 and some of them are still very mentally alert five to 10 years after they might have retired.
Again, the issue of corruption comes in. Unless someone is really perverted, when you retire, your anxiety to make billions out of the election petitions will be greatly reduced. But I believe we can still get retired judges, particularly those with clean records without any blemish, to handle election petitions.
It is almost a year after the national conference concluded its sittings, but till now, its recommendations are yet to be implemented. What do you think is responsible for the delay?
All these conferences that we have had were only to buy time. They only used them to buy time. Even before the inauguration of that conference, I knew that we were not going to get anywhere. There is nowhere the outcome or the decisions of conferences like that can be implemented. The president had his way when he inaugurated it, he spent a lot of money and kept people quiet and he succeeded in doing that. He is going to have some problems in implementing some of these recommendations because some of them can only be done by act of parliament. But some can still be done by the executive fiat.
