Even Faster Than J-FASTER

One of the hardest things about leaving Uganda three weeks ago was the fact that the Masindi J-FASTER session for children imprisoned at the Ihungu Remand Home was scheduled to begin the following week.  While the Kampala J-FASTER session had taken the full 90 days we had allotted for it, we believed we could deliver justice to imprisoned children even faster.

Accordingly, the Masindi session was fast(er) tracked.  Our goal was to reduce by 30 days the time it took to get the children through the process.  The Pepperdine lawyers flew in from Malibu and the Pepperdine students drove up to Masindi from Kampala to interview the kids and prepare their cases in mid-June.  As mentioned previously, joining the Pepperdine team was Abby Skeans, a Regent Law student who was also spending her summer in Uganda.  While in Uganda, Abby served as a legal intern for Sixty Feet – a Christian NGO headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.  Given my close friendship with the Sixty Feet team, and given the good relationship Pepperdine enjoys with Regent, I had the privilege of “supervising” Abby during her eight weeks in Uganda.

From the beginning, Abby blended in easily with the Pepperdine students.  She was also very proactive and eager to get things accomplished.  For example, Abby took Pepperdine’s idea of creating a digital tracking system for all juvenile prisoners in Uganda (so that no kids would ever fall through the cracks again) and ran with it.  She and I initially met with the various Ministry of Gender officials who could approve such a project, and then she took the baton and sprinted forward.  Since I left Uganda, the final approvals for a pilot database project have been secured, and the database has been developed, thanks in no small part to computer wiz Dan Owens of Sixty Feet.  We hope to have the database project in place in the next few weeks.  A more complete description of this program and its current status is here in Abby’s blog.

Since Abby came to Kampala a few weeks later than the Pepperdine students, she was also staying in Uganda several weeks after we all left.  This meant that she would be around when the Masindi J-FASTER session started.  Additionally, a court official named Sarah, who had worked very closely with us in the Kampala session, also agreed to travel back and forth to Masindi in order to ensure that the J-FASTER procedures were both understood and observed by the court officials in Masindi.  Sarah’s expenses were covered by Sixty Feet.  An additional bonus is that Sarah had previously worked closely with the High Court judge who would be presiding over the Masindi J-FASTER session.  This same judge had worked closely with the Pepperdine team that had first traveled to Masindi for a juvenile justice project in January of 2010 during my first visit to Uganda.

As I experienced during my time in Uganda, it is foolish to expect everything to go according to plan.  That simply never happens.  Indeed, in Masindi, plenty went wrong.  For example, the lawyer who was supposed to represent the children went on leave the week before the trials were to start.  Fortunately, Abby was able to cajole her back from a different part of Uganda just in time.  As with the Kampala J-FASTER session, Sixty Feet generously funded the costs of the session so that these kids would not continue to languish in prison – some had been there for more than two years just waiting for someone to do something.  Additionally, as the session began, some “irregularities” developed with respect to the funds that had been deposited with the court.  Abby, Sarah, and others got this straightened out and recovered the “misplaced” funds. Abby and Sarah also gently, or not so gently, urged the rest of the players to complete their tasks – the role I had played in Kampala – and the session finally got underway in late July.

Just before I left, I had traveled to Masindi with Sarah, another Ugandan attorney, and two Pepperdine law students for a plea bargaining session with the prosecuting and defense attorneys. During that meeting, we had reached plea agreements on approximately three quarters of the twenty-two cases.  At that time, the lawyers agreed to continue discussions about the others.  When the court session began two weeks ago, however, they attorneys had reached deals on all but one of the cases.  Accordingly, the session moved forward with virtually no work to be done by the trial judge.  The following week, almost all of the children were sentenced, mostly in accordance with plea deals had been reached.  Most of these kids are now being resettled back home as I write this.  While each case is unique and tragic, one case really stands out from the others.

One of the boys, call him Sam, had been charged with murdering his father.  There was no dispute that his father had been killed, the question was simply who did it.  Prior to his arrest, Sam was in school and doing well, even though his father had moved his family from place to place about once a year.  Sam’s father was a physically abusive alcoholic and dabbled in Ugandan traditional healing (witch doctor stuff).  The family’s frequent moves were usually occasioned by his father being driven out of town by the locals.  From everything we could gather, it appeared that either Sam or his mother had killed Sam’s father after a particularly brutal series of physically abusive episodes against Sam and his mother.  After Sam was arrested, the police say that Sam initially confessed that he had killed his father, but he later insisted that he didn’t do it.  While in the Ihungu Remand Home, Sam had become the spiritual leader of the boys.  He also ached to resume his education.

During the plea discussions, the attorney representing the children reported that Sam would not plead guilty to a crime he did not commit.  Since he had been at Ihungu for less than a year, and since the maximum sentence for a juvenile is three years, he very likely faced more than two additional years in prison if he was convicted of the crime.  After I returned to the United States, I learned that a plea deal had later been reached that would result in Sam serving only an additional ten months in exchange for a plea of guilty.  Reluctantly, Sam accepted the deal, even though it is increasingly clear that he is taking the fall for another family member who actually killed Sam’s father.  Sam’s plight had so captured the attention (and heart) of Sixty Feet that they had agreed to sponsor his continuing education after he finished serving his additional sentence.  Earlier this week, I learned that after hearing about Sam’s case, the sentencing judge rejected the plea deal.  The judge had been so impressed by Sam, and had been so touched by Sixty Feet’s willingness to sponsor Sam’s return to school, Sam was sentenced to . . . time served.  Abby reports that upon hearing his sentence, Sam dropped to his knees and began offering a prayer of thanksgiving to God.  He has since been transported to Kampala where he will resume school in two weeks.

Here are a couple other quick updates.  First, the trial in the final case in the Kampala J-FASTER session concluded just before I left, but the judge had not yet entered her verdict.  The two adults charged with murder in this case (the juvenile had been dismissed from the consolidated case) were convicted and sentenced to 40 and 35 years, respectively.  Had they accepted a plea bargain, they would have saved themselves about twenty years each.  Hopefully the word will spread around the prison so that more will be willing to plea bargain.

Second, Henry has now finished his second of three terms of his Senior 5 year.  He continues to very much enjoy school and has lots of friends.  It is difficult to tell for sure how well he is doing because the school intentionally grades the students very hard the first two terms.  (Henry’s understanding is that he is somewhere near the middle of his class in the top school in the country where he is studying).  Only two of the two hundred in his class met the standard that the school says it will require everyone to meet next term in order to advance to the final Senior 6 year of secondary school.  I understand from numerous sources that the top schools routinely give low marks in the first two terms as a motivational tool for their students.

My intent is to resume posting once or twice a week from this point forward.  In my next post, I will add my perspective, for what it is worth, to the recent debate about Chick Fil A, free speech, and marriage.