Justice Joel Agya, Chief Judge of Taraba on Thursday identified 169 cases of awaiting trials pending in the Medium Custodian Centre Jalingo with a pledge to intervene.
Agya made this known while interacting with inmates in the Jalingo medium custodian center.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the chief judge was visiting the centre for the first time since his appointment as the number one judge of the state.
He observed that many of the cases were minor in nature but were left pending on awaiting trials for the period between two to five years.
The chief judge said that some of the inmates had no business been in the custodian centre,
saying that those cases were from magistrate courts and other lower courts.
Agya said that he was at the centre to help grant bail and discharge some of those inmates on such categories but the absence of some magistrates handling such cases as well as descrepancies between police prosecutors and the ministry of justice caused him to shift the excercise to another date.
He also gave the inmate assurance that he would follow up on the cases to ensure that they were granted bail as soon as those concerned magistrates returned from their official engagements.
He thanked the Nigerian Correctional Service (NCS) for the robust partnership with the state judiciary in ensuring that justice was served to the common man.
“My visit here today is in fulfilment of my earlier promise to the Controller of the NCS, who visited me and demanded that I should assist in the decongestion of the facility.
“I have come today to investigate cases on awaiting trials and my next visit will touch on some of the convicted cases.
” I will not go into cases that attract capital punishment such as kidnapping, armed robbery and culpable homicide,” he said.
Earlier, Murtala Haruna, Controller NCS Taraba command, thanked the chief judge for the visit.
Mr Haruna said that the visit would go along way in giving liberty to some inmates, who were uneccessarily incarcerated.
“Your visit is a tastement of the fact that Judiciary is the last hope of a common man,” he said.
NAN reports that the Director of Prosecution, Chief Registrar, Legal Aid Council, magistrates and judges, prosecutors and representatives of Nigerian Bar Association were on the entourage.
(NAN
