I was shocked to know by a conversation with someone involved in matters of prison that currently in one of the prisons in Ghana with a population of about 900, more than 300 are on remand with some for more than 10 years have never been to the court for their cases to be finalized. About 50 of those convicted were there for verbally abusing their victims. With some of the stories, most of the cases could have been dealt with by some form of arbitration.<\/p>\n
One instance that shocked me was that a caretaker of a cocoa farm was convicted for 15 years for stealing from his master. Upon hearing his case, a visitor to the prison went all the way to follow up to appeal and got justice for the man. What was the issue?<\/p>\n
The master of the cocoa farm promised the caretaker a share of the cocoa farm should he work for ten years with him. He was diligent and worked as expected. About two years to hit the mark to qualify for the share promised him, the master charged him with theft which ended him up in prison. The charge was that he was sent to go and sell some cocoa as usual but never brought the proceeds. Who was the witness in this situation? The long and short is the sentence which took a visitor after some years to appeal and finally had his freedom.<\/p>\n
Another was a guy who was charged by a policeman for theft and within two hours, he had been sentenced to two and a half years imprisonment. The policeman was interested in his girlfriend who was the daughter of his prosecutor. The prosecutor also spoke the same language as the judge and his freedom was traded to allow the daughter to be free. He was also coached by an investigator officer that, he should go to court and plead guilty and the judge will have pity on him to set him free. That was how the network sold him to prison.<\/p>\n
I can imagine how many people have lost their livelihood because their booming life was terminated with an avoidable sentence if they had known had to plea their course and case in court. We should have enough legal professionals to help with the many victims that might be lingering in jail with pardonable offenses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was shocked to know by a conversation with someone involved in matters of prison that currently in one of the prisons in Ghana with a population of about 900, more than 300 are on remand with some for more than 10 years have never been to the court for their cases to be finalized. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2852,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,356,5],"tags":[462,120,459,458],"class_list":["post-2855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-emotions","category-legal","category-opinions","tag-convict","tag-legal","tag-policeman","tag-prison"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adugyasidennis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adugyasidennis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adugyasidennis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adugyasidennis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adugyasidennis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2855"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/adugyasidennis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2856,"href":"https:\/\/adugyasidennis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2855\/revisions\/2856"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adugyasidennis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adugyasidennis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adugyasidennis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adugyasidennis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}