Crime Diary: FRN v Timothy and 5 others.

For the first time in my life I cried in court.

Today, 6 accused persons were arraigned in court. Their offenses among others were,  Robbery, kidnap and the murder of the deceased resident in the Abuja metropolis.

The deceased had hired one of the accused (second defendant) as his personal driver. The facts of the case, suggests that this accused person, conspired with the rest to have his boss kidnapped and then murdered.

The accused person was driving his boss (the deceased) to work, when the other accused persons waylaid the driver and the deceased at gun point. They led the deceased to a lonely location, where they killed him and took his vehicle.

The accused later went ahead to bury the man in a shallow grave around Gwarimpa in Abuja. They stole other valuables too belonging to the deceased.

It was late in the night, when the deceased failed to come home, that the wife alerted her father of the continued absence of his husband and in turn, the father-in-law of the deceased alerted the authorities.

The matter was reported to the Police station in Gwarimpa, to which it was transfered to the Special Anti Robbery squad of the Nigeria Police force. The police swung into action and made a successful arrest of all six accused. That is; including the driver which is the second defendant.

In the police custody, the accused persons wrote their individual confessional statements.

In their respective statements, they admitted to the crimes and were remorseful for their deeds.

Now to the crux of the matter!

During the trial, the second Defendant (the driver) and other 5 accused persons asked the court to reject their very own confessional statements at the police station, in which they admitted to the crimes and were remorseful.

In their prayer to the court, they sought to have that statement struck out.

The lawyer to the second defendant contended that the confessional statements made at the police station were made out of duress.

The lawyer, speaking for his client submitted that members of SARS of the Nigeria police force had earlier used force, starvation, beating including harsh living conditions at the police custody to extract the information the defendants had written down and signed.

The judge in a sigh of distress, ordered for a trial within trial.

Now a trial within trial is not for the court to look at the substantive matter at hand. The trial is only to test the facts of the case, in light of the substantive law, to see if the confessional statements made at the police station can be admitted in court as evidence.

In a nutshell, the court was trying to see if indeed the police had bullied the accused into admitting that they did indeed kill the deceased.

During the trial within trial, the prosecutor called his second witness which is the father-in-law to the deceased. (The same man who had first alerted the authorities about the deceased continuous absence.)

The Chief prosecutor called his witness. the court clerk swore-in the witness and he was duly admitted as a witness before the honorable court.

The prosecutor then started his examination in Chief.

He asked the man to narrate what he saw and what led to the point of him seeing what he saw.

The man, father in law to the deceased then started narrating how he reported the matter to the police and how the police went immediately to the office of the deceased to make investigations. Then he narrated how the police tracked down the defendants and how the driver admitted to killing his son-in-law. He also narrated how they were led to the grave of the deceased.

It was when he was narrating how he saw his son-in-law's mangled body in dirt and blood inside a shallow grave, that he broke down in tears.

The whole court, including the prison warders were filled with tears.

Mine too without exception came pouring like a Dam. I turned to the accused person and he was chewing gum in court. His both hands were folded against his breast in what seemed like an unremorseful gesture.

The prison warder whispered to me during our conversation that he would really want the driver in particular, to be found guilty and that it would be his greatest joy that he be sentenced to life imprisonment.

The chief prosecutor stood up to ask the man to man-up and stop crying, but the judge asked the prosecutor to give his witness some time to cry.

That was how the court gave the witness some minutes to put himself together and by extension we also used the same few minutes to cry and wipe our tears.

After the little drama, the witness requested for a seat to sit. he gave oral testimony in court that he was 74 years old and already exhausted from the whole matter.

The man then went on to give further evidence about how he first met the driver when he was newly brought to Abuja from Onitsha to work as a driver for the accused.

Before he was done, the lawyer to the second defendant(the driver,) rose from his seat and objected to the whole oral testimony by the Prosecution Witness.

In his argument, the whole story was unimportant to the matter at hand. He drew the attention of the court that a trial within trial is to determine whether or not the police did bully the defendants into making confessions under duress and intimidation and not whether or not the confessions of the accused are true.

In a nutshell, he said that the job of the court today was not to find the truth in the whole matter. but to rather find to see if the police had conducted themselves in a responsible manner during the times they were extracting information from the accused. He backed up his submission with a 2018 case of Charles V. The Federal Republic of Nigeria.

The witness in turn, in order to show that operatives of SARS did not force the confession out of the accused, told the court that in one of his visits to the police station, the DPO told him that it was standing order and a police ethic not to beat or force confessions out of accused persons.

After the examination in chief and now, during the cross examination of the Prosecution Witness, the lawyer to the defendant asked the Witness if he was present at the police station during the time(s) the accused persons made the confession, to know if they were coerced into admitting to the crimes.

The witness answered No. the defense Lawyer then told the judge that he had no further question for the witness.

The second defendant prayed to the court to discountenance all that the witness had said in court including the crying too, that it was irrelevant to the matter at hand.

The case was adjourned to a later date.