A man was sentenced to death for murder during the first videoconference trial by a Nigerian court, we learned from judicial sources on Tuesday 5 May.
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The Ikeja de Lagos court, which held the first virtual justice session in Nigeria, sentenced Olalekan Hameed to death for a murder committed in December 2018. “I convict you Olalekan Hameed and sentence you to death by hanging. May God have mercy on your soul. Here is the virtual judgment of the Court, ” said Judge Mojisola Dada, on the application of Zoom videoconference.
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The trial lasted three hours, "all parties" were represented and some selected journalists were able to attend the online session, notes the famous civil society group TransparencIT Nigeria, which encourages Nigerian justice to speed up the legal proceedings.
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At the end of April, the Nigerian presidency called for "rapid trials to decongest prisons in the country in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic". "According to President Buhari, according to the available data, the prison population in Nigeria amounts to 74,127 detained persons, and 52,226 of them are still awaiting their trial", according to a press release from the presidency of April 21.
In a country where the justice system is dysfunctional and plagued by corruption, 75% of those incarcerated have never been sentenced and have sometimes been awaiting trial for years. Human rights monitoring organizations estimate that 2,000 people are on death row in Nigeria in 2000, but only seven have been executed in the past decade.
The federal states have their own laws on the death penalty, applied for various crimes, including murder and kidnapping.
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