Lagos High Court Releases Man Tortured, Detained For 11 Years Without Trial
A man identified as Maxwell Dele has been released by the Lagos State High Court after being detained for over 11 years without trial.
Avocats Sans Frontières France (Lawyers without Borders France) disclosed this via a statement released on Monday, May 30.
Also Read: #JusticeForBamise: Court Remands BRT Driver For 30 Days Over Alleged Rape, Murder
The organization asserted that the practice of charging suspects with serious offences in order to have them remanded in prison indefinitely with little or no effort to prosecute the case needed to stop.
Speaking about remand without trial, the Country Director of Director of ASF France in Nigeria, Angela Uzoma-Iwuchukwu, said the Nigeria Correctional Service data on the summary of inmate population by convict and persons awaiting trial as of October 4, 2021, revealed that the facilities hold 37 percent more inmates than they were designed to and that over 70 percent of the prison population consisted of pre-trial detainees.
According to the report, the average period of pre-trial detention in Nigeria is nearly four years.
ASF research revealed that many detainees were held for much longer, as in this case of Dele, who was “arbitrarily detained for over 11 years, reflecting both an overburdened justice system and structural problems between Nigeria’s state and federal justice systems.”
However, in Dele’s case, it was gathered that officers of the Nigeria Police Force were on the hunt for a certain individual called James Idem, whom they believed was responsible for an armed robbery operation.
During the search for Idem, Dele was asked by the police officers to provide information on the whereabouts of the suspect and when he could not provide necessary information, he was arrested for armed robbery.
He was handed over to Sagamu Road Police Station, from where he was transferred to SARS Ikeja, Lagos, where he was allegedly hanged and tortured constantly.
Dele was also forced to sign an already written statement on October 6, 2011, the same day he was charged with armed robbery at the Magistrate Court 17, Ikeja.
