Some capital offence defence lawyers have been trained on the proper way to do their job by Hope Behind Bars Africa.
At the workshop for the capital defence lawyers in Nigeria and Ghana themed, ‘Defending Persons Facing Death Penalty’ funded in part by the Makwanyane Institute Stewardship Grant, Hope Behind Bars Africa Executive Director (ED), Mrs. Funke Adeoye, said: “It is important when representing our clients to know if they were in the right state of mind when the offence was committed because, according to law, you have to consider the mental intent to commit the crime. So, we are looking at what the signs can be seen in our clients that might help us suspect that there might have been a mental health illness and we need to bring an expert to evaluate the person.’
“We also know that, as lawyers, we take in a lot of traumatic experiences of suspects and victims, so the question is how do we ensure that these things we take in does not affect our state of mind as lawyers, so we brought experts to help look at these issues.”
“We want to see how we can build a community of practice of capital defenders in Nigeria, who will be able to jump on the efforts of the abolishment of mandatory death penalty, outside the training to begin to look at the issues, gaps and work with the government to ensure that clients that are facing the death penalty are effectively represented and everyone gets justice.
“What we want to achieve is to ensure that a person accused of committing a capital offence is adequately represented by virtue of the Constitution which gives everyone the right to justice and that is inclusive of the victim of the crime.”
Director, The Inclusion Project (TIP), Pamela Okoroigwe said the idea is to train and equip capital defenders with the right skills and best practices for defending capital offenders effectively in court because some lawyers really don’t have the right skills.
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She added: “We hope that when the trained lawyers return to their communities and law firms, they will be able to train others so we can have that critical line of lawyers that we are looking for.
“The goal is to ensure that our clients do not end up on the gallows so we want to ensure our lawyers are making use of all the options available to them. Please bargaining where there is an overwhelming evidence, clemency where maybe all the options have been exhausted or even when they haven’t and you want to try it.”
On the aspect of Mental health, Founder of the sunshine series, Aisha Buba said when most people in the country hear of mental health, they assume only people roaming on the streets can be put in such categories.
She said the COVID-19 out break showed us that everybody has the potential to develop a mental health condition, either depression or anxiety.
Buba added: “Most times when we hear about mental health, we think about the person that we see roaming on the streets, that’s all but that’s not it.There is a wide range, a lot of things fall on their mental health in fact, stress burnout. They all fall under mental health.”
