OPD AND ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE IN LAGOS
June Vincent
The Office of the Public Defender (OPD), under the supervision of Lagos State Ministry of Justice was created by the erstwhile Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration in 2000 to provide free legal services to indigent persons in the state. It was a product of innovative and creative thinking and was the first of its kind by any state government in the country. It has since become a model for other states to copy.
The scope of OPD’s operation includes, among others, provision of qualitative legal service for the indigent through representation in courts, offering free legal advice, promoting respect for human rights, the law and the constitution and ensuring equal access to justice. For effectiveness in dealing with matters that come to OPD, cases are divided into four general sections such as litigation and defence in court, Police Matters, Mediation and Rescue Missions.
Since inception till date, OPD has continued to provide free legal services to the poor and disadvantaged who are financially incapacitated to seek redress in the law courts. Within one year of its existence, OPD recovered over N6million in damages, compensation, salary arrears, workers benefits as well as unpaid sum of contractual work done. It also effected the release of several juveniles incarcerated in several police cells and prisons across the State without trial.
Till date, OPD has dealt with a total of 60,724 Petitions and has been able to aid the release and acquittal of many inmates over the years; records show that on the average two inmates awaiting trial are released on a monthly basis due to the efforts of the OPD. On the whole, OPD has assisted Petitioners in the recovery of a total of about N200million Naira over the years. This amount spread over and include; child maintenance claims, salary arrears and benefits, compensation for industrial accidents at work and other sundry claims.
Understandably, OPD has special strategic interest in issues affecting the vulnerable in the society mainly women and children. Children’s maintenance is a major issue in our society today due to different reasons, but the bottom line is that it is a mandatory duty of parents to take care of their wards and the OPD does its best to ensure that the interest of every child within the State is preserved.
To properly situate the intervention of OPD in the state’s justice sector, it is important to draw attention to what was obtainable before the advent of the agency. Prior to its creation, criminal defence was only available to the defendant who had a family willing to retain the services of counsel in private practice to defend him or her and a lot of defendants awaiting trial had no representation because they could not afford the services of a lawyer.
It was also the case that issues involving the most vulnerable members of the society especially women and children were being swept under the carpet as the norm was not to wash ‘our dirty linen’ in public. Cases of domestic violence were traditionally dealt with by the police who described them as family disputes and either refused to be involved or parties were enjoined to go home and ‘settle the dispute themselves’.
Cases of rape and other forms of sexual violence were also not reported to the authorities by victims for fear of stigmatization and mockery mitted out at the police station and by the society at large. This meant that most victims bore the emotional, physical and psychological scars in silence for the rest of their lives.
For a period of 33 years from the creation of Lagos State in 1967, to the year 2000 when OPD was created, the situation had become such that a good size of the population believed that justice was the prerogative of the affluent. As for those that had the courage to report crimes especially such as rape, the victims were usually discouraged by long delays in prosecution, poor investigation, poor preservation of evidence, lack of forensic capacity on the part of the police to collect evidence, lack of training on how to process the evidence that was collected and most of the time, destruction of evidence, as the victims in most cases would have had their bath and would have washed all the evidence to be collected away before going to the police.
A further impediment is the fact that all cases except where they affect children are tried in open court putting the victims of sexual offences through the embarrassment of recalling and recounting the experience in public, in a long and arduous trial and thus traumatizing the victim all over again
The police also for many years did not have Family Support Unit for victims as they have today; there was no avenue for the rehabilitation of victims, a necessary tool for their recovery. Instead, the norm was that if cases such as rape, defilement of children, domestic violence arose, the police encouraged the settlement of such cases by the community and the family (if the victim is lucky enough to have family in Lagos). Such supposed settlement might involve persuading the perpetrator of the crime to marry the victim if she is pregnant or pay some money to the victims’ family entrenching the archaic belief that saving the family honour was the most important factor. This of course led to further psychological damage to the victim who felt dehumanized again by such arrangement.
For many other criminal offences such as murder, causing death as a result of reckless driving, fraud etc., some perpetrators get away because so many of these cases went unreported especially when the victims were indigents and they believed that if they reported the case, the police will exploit the situation and demand money to prosecute such a case.
This meant that where the victim of the crime was indigent and had no strong family unit to fall back on, the victim was denied justice by the very system meant to ensure Justice for all .Of course what this resulted in was to make the less privileged vulnerable to abuse and violation of rights.
As a result of all the above issues, the convictions in courts were few. The indigent victims were therefore deprived of justice; prisons were also congested with persons awaiting trial who had no representation because they could not afford the services of private practitioners.
Without any doubt, the coming on board of OPD has had a tremendous impact on the administration of justice in the state. Certainly OPD is part of the success story of Lagos State at 50 and it is a legacy that is worth preserving.
