Juvenile Justice Proposal . . . Approved

Yesterday was another good day in Uganda.  We have been having quite a few of those recently, and we are thankful for the many prayers offered on our behalf and on behalf of those with whom we are interacting on a daily basis.

For the past several months, I have been working with Shane Michael on a proposal for the judiciary to streamline and expedite the juvenile justice system here in Uganda.  This is one of the two primary projects I am focusing on during my six months here.  Shane is one of my former students at Pepperdine who is serving as a Nootbaar Fellow in Uganda for one year.  While Shane is embedded with the Commercial Court, he hopes to become a prosecutor in the United States so he has a real interest in assisting with the development of the criminal justice system here.

My interest in the development of the criminal justice system in Uganda began during my first trip to Uganda in January of 2010.  At that time, I came with Jay Milbrandt (Pepperdine’s Global Justice Program Director), and two alums (David Barrett and Ray Boucher) on a project with Bob Goff’s Restore International to try to help 21 kids who had been languishing in a Ugandan Remand Home (prison) in Masindi awaiting trial.  That is where I met Henry.

Since then, I have been part of two other teams of American lawyers, partnering on the most recent trip with Ugandan lawyers and law students, to prepare the cases for two additional groups of imprisoned children at the Naguru Remand Home in the capital city of Kampala.  On each trip, we refined our processes and briefing templates to make our work more efficient and useful.  Accordingly, the proposal Shane and I have been working on has the benefit of first-hand experience within the system.

Uganda’s Children Act mandates that juveniles (ages 13-17) accused of capital crimes (those eligible for the death penalty if committed by adults) shall not be held for more than six months before their trials.  Unfortunately, a combination of a lack of resources, structure, and internal checks and balances causes this time limit to be routinely exceeded.  Several of the juveniles (including Henry) we have worked to free had been on remand for two years or more before their trials.

Our proposal involves taking fifteen of the juveniles in the Naguru Remand Home who are charged with capital offenses and using their cases as a test run to demonstrate that justice can be delivered much more quickly and efficiently.  This proposal was ready to go within a few days of my arrival in Uganda in late January.  Unfortunately, the timing of leave (vacation) and travel schedules of key players on the judiciary caused the official presentation of the proposal to be delayed until yesterday.  We felt so good about the likelihood of acceptance of our proposal that we went ahead and assembled all of the necessary players to implement the proposal and were able to convince them to commit to participating once it got approved.

We first met with the Ministry of Gender, Labour, and Social Development.  Uganda’s Remand Homes fall within the jurisdiction of this Ministry, and I had previously met with the officer who directly oversees the Remand Homes.  We pitched our proposal to her, and she readily agreed that our proposal should be adopted and implemented.  She even proposed the aspect that eventually became Phase 4, which is discussed below.

We then met with the Department of Public Prosecutions (including the Director himself).  This was the most critical meeting of all because the DPP’s procedures and practices would be most directly affected by our proposal.  We were pleased that the Director of the DPP embraced the proposal and assigned two of his prosecutors to work directly with us.

Next came the Uganda Christian Lawyer’s Fraternity.  UCLF has two aspects.  First, it is a professional organization of practicing Christian lawyers who voluntarily donate their time on a pro bono basis.  The second aspect involves a group of four full-time lawyers who do pro bono legal aid work.  This second group is largely funded by an organization in the UK.  The President of UCLF is the lawyer with whom I have been working on Henry’s appeal, and he was eager to connect us with the Director of UCLF’s full-time group.  I had actually worked with this Director last summer when I was here with some other lawyers working on preparing cases at the Naguru Remand Home.  That time, we had recruited the UCLF to work with us on those cases so that we could eventually work ourselves into obsolescence, which needs to be the goal of foreign countries and organizations as they seek to train the Ugandans to deliver these services themselves.  As we expected, UCLF was eager to join in, and their representation of the kids would be provided at no charge.

Next, I met with my friend Brian Dennison at Uganda Christian University, who is an American lawyer living in Uganda and directing the Clinical Program (among other things) at UCU’s law school.  During our last juvenile justice trip, not only had we included UCLF attorneys, but we had also recruited Ugandan law students to serve as the interpreters for the juvenile prisoners for whom English was not comfortable (about half of them).  These UCU law students not only interpreted for us, but they also materially contributed to the preparation of these cases for trial, working alongside Pepperdine law students in a partnership that benefitted everyone.  As expected, UCU law students are hungry for practical and meaningful opportunities to work on real cases, and UCU and UCLF have worked together in the past.

The next piece in this puzzle was Naguru’s warden and the probation and social welfare officers who work directly with the children, not only caring for their physical needs, but also providing crucial logistical support for moving the juveniles through the criminal justice process.  Before any child can be sentenced in Uganda (whether the child pleads guilty or is found guilty after a trial), the probation and social welfare officer must first prepare a Pre-Sentence report.  Every day this report is delayed is one more day the juvenile must spend incarcerated.  Accordingly, it was important for us to get the Naguru officials to sign off on the timeline we were proposing.  Since we had gotten to know all of these officials during our prior visits, they were eager to adopt our proposal.  They also confirmed that the timelines we proposed are reasonable and obtainable, assuming they had the funds to be able to make the trips to the villages from which these children came.

This, of course, implicates the final piece of the proposal – the funding.  As mentioned in prior posts, the cost associated with moving people and paper in this country is often the biggest hurdle to getting anything accomplished.  Such expenditures must not only be approved in advance, but the funds must be disbursed in advance also.  No one has a government (or private) credit card whereby charged can be incurred and then later reimbursed.  And the red tape necessary to get these funds in advance injects huge delays (and opportunities for corruption) into the process.  Enter Sixty Feet.

I have written about this American organization previously, but in a nutshell, they are a group of Americans from the Southeast who have a heart for the imprisoned youth of Uganda.  And they have put their time and treasures toward serving these children.  I encourage you to read more about them here and to consider supporting their efforts.  For the past 18 months or so, Sixty Feet has been providing physical, medical, psychological, and spiritual care for the children at the five Remand Homes in Uganda (among other things).  Through some avenues that God opened up, Joline and I had the opportunity to spend some time with a couple of the principals of Sixty Feet before we left the United States to come here.  This friendship has grown into partnership, and Sixty Feet has agreed to fund the costs of the pilot program.  Huge answered prayer.

Accordingly, as of about two weeks ago, we had all the pieces in place to roll out the pilot program, save for the most important one – the judiciary.  Shane and I created a written proposal, a Power Point presentation, and the five Forms that will be used in implementing the proposal and distributed them to the members of the Criminal Division of the High Court.  After a few preliminary discussions and meetings, the final decision-making meeting was yesterday.  It couldn’t have gone better.  The court appropriately made some minor modifications and tweaks to the timeline and to one of the forms, and then approved us to go forward.

We have now scheduled a meeting for late next week of all of the participants so that everyone can meet each other and develop healthy working relationships as we kick this off.  We have also brought in UNICEF for this next meeting, so they can observe the pilot program and potentially integrate it elsewhere.  They are also a potential funding source down the road.

So what is the proposal?  It is called J-FASTER – The Judiciary Facilitating Access to Swift Trial and Efficient Resolution.  Kinda corny, but we hope the FASTER part can have some subliminal effect.  It is four phases.

Phase One is the Investigatory Phase.  This will run from April 1 to May 1.  During this phase, the cases that will be included in this J-FASTER program will be selected.  Fortunately, this has already been done.  The DPP lawyers (prosecutors) have already accompanied us to the Remand Home and selected the fifteen oldest cases – some more than 18 months old (a travesty for those children).  Also in Phase One, the UCLF lawyer, the UCU law students, and the probation and social welfare officers will meet with the children and prepare a summary of the children’s background, including education levels, family status, and get the children’s version of the events.

Phase Two is the Evaluative Phase.  This will run from May 1 to June 1.  At the beginning of this phase, the DPP will turn over the police report and other evidence it has against the child to the UCLF defense lawyer.  (This disclosure of evidence against a criminal defendant prior to trial is a critical change to existing custom and practice).  During this phase, the DPP will decide whether it has enough evidence against the child to proceed with the case.  Also during this phase, the UCLF lawyer will confer again with the child to prepare for the resolution of the case.  And of critical importance, during this phase, the probation and social welfare officer will travel to the child’s home area (often hundreds of miles away) and begin preparing the Pre-Sentence Report so that there is no delay at the end of the case.

Phase Three is the Resolution Phase.  This will run from June 1 to July 1.  At the beginning of this phase, there will be a very important session with the judge.  At that session, one of four things will happen.  First, the DPP may decide not to proceed with the case and the charges can be dismissed.  Second, the child may decide to plead guilty and then proceed to sentencing (where the children will get credit for time served).  Third, DPP and the UCLF lawyer could reach a plea bargain, which we will strongly encourage so that we can model how plea bargaining works for adult cases as well.  And fourth, everyone could decide that there will need to be a trial.  Under this proposal, the trial will have to occur within thirty days.  Furthermore, the proposal calls for sentencing within seven days.

Phase Four is the Resettlement Phase.  In Uganda, when a child commits a crime, it is treated as a crime against the community.  This, in turn, means that in order for the child to be accepted back into the community, there needs to be some closure.  There are village elders (called Local Council members) who can work with the probation and social welfare officers to facilitate this resettlement process.  This happens quite inconsistently, but we have built it into our proposal and the Sixty Feet funding will make this possible.

Sorry this is so long, but I have been almost completely silent about this work until we got the final approval.

Off to Jinja for whitewater rafting and bungee jumping in the morning.  Lots of pictures to come.