Admin l Tuesday, September 24, 2019
LAGOS, Nigeria – A Senior Advocate of Nigeria(SAN) Mr. Kemi Pinheiro today blamed trial-within-trial system as the major cause of delay in criminal justice and called for its abolition.
He called for ammendment of the ‘burden of proof’ in the ‘Evidence Act’, 2011 to reduce delay in criminal justice administration.
Pinheiro made the suggestion today in a 40-page paper titled: “The Admissibility of Confessional Statements: Imperatives of Trial Within Trial” delivered at the Lagos State Judiciary 2019/2020 Legal Year Stakeholder’s Summit held at the Lagos City Hall.
Pinheiro said the Administration of Criminal Justice Act 2015 is fraught with so much inadequacies that they are delaying justice delivery process and suggested a practice direction that would remove ‘trial within trial’ from judicial processes.
He said confessional statements alone cannot secure conviction and that so much time is being wasted on admissibility of ‘one document in ‘trial within trial’.
“We don’t operate a jury system. Why then are we still conducting ‘trial within trial’, .Trial within trial being foreign to our existing non-jury system law and having contributed immensely to the delay in justice delivery in criminal matters ought not to be conducted anymore in our legal system”, he said.
To buttress his postion, he cited the case of a judge who got carried away with arguments and submissions in a ‘trial within trial’ that he ended up giving judgment without hearing the substantive suit.
Pinheiro advocated that extraction of confessional statements of accused persons or defendants should be taken away from the police, and given to Magistrates or other judicial officers who must not only study the demeanor of a defendant, but also ensures that defendants is completely free while making the statement voluntarily as being done in India.
He argued that this way, controversies surrounding confessional statements will be completely eradicated.
He said that trial judges should then be entitled to, from the totality of the evidence led by parties, deliver judgments and in same expunge the confessional statement from their records, where found to be involuntarily made and, or act on same if found to be voluntarily made.
The senior lawyer argued that Section 29 (2) (a) – (b) of the Evidence Act, 2011 which governs admissibility of confessional statements and sets out the circumstances under which statements qualifying as confessions will be admitted.
“Curiously, and interestingly Section 29, as with any other section of the entire Evidence Act, makes no mention of the phrase “trial within trial. I make bold to say that the phrase does not exist in our statutory lexicon. Rather it is a practice that has evolved over time to test the voluntariness of a statement qualifying as a confession”, he said.
The Chief Judge, Justice Kazeem Alogba, in a welcome remark, noted that congestion of prisons has become a major problem to the judiciary.
Justice Alogba admitted that ‘trial within trial’ has been a major contributory factor to prison congestion and that it was what informed the choice of the topic of this year’s Summit on Criminal Justice Sector.He urged stakeholders to look at ‘trial within trial’ within the context of solving the problem of prison congestion and delayed trial.
