Providential Confluences

Birthday Dinner (Denise Madigan, Professor Bell, Aaron, Judge Goldberg, Emily, Susan, Judge Beeman

The events of the past two days have reminded me that diligence, patience, and prayer often lead to positive outcomes.  Henry’s father David was laid to rest from his toil and pain on this earth on Thursday.  Regretfully, I was unable to travel the three-plus hours each way to attend the gathering due to the full schedule of meetings at which I was a necessary party.  Over the course of Wednesday and Thursday, my mourning was seasoned heavily with dashes (and perhaps truckloads) of hope and anticipation.

On Wednesday morning, I met for an hour with the Principal Judge of Uganda, who is in charge of the entire trial court system (called the High Court).  He Chairs the Plea Bargaining Committee, which consists of ten men and women tasked with creating the structure for Uganda’s adaptation of plea bargaining in their criminal justice system.  (A structure we developed in 2012 for doing this in the juvenile realm is functioning, at least as well as such systems function here).  Joining us at this meeting was the Secretary of the Committee, who is responsible for drafting the judicial instrument (called a Practice Direction) that will be used to roll out plea bargaining on a wide scale.  He will then be the one responsible for turning that instrument into legislation before Parliament.  The Secretary and I spent another hour together walking through the current working draft and making revisions and edits.

During this meeting, he informed me that a delegation of eight Ugandan judges and lawmakers are hoping to engage in a final “benchmarking” visit to the United States before they finalize their internal and external plea bargaining documents.  This visit to Pepperdine will likely take place in early May.

While I was at the High Court for this meeting, I learned from a highly placed source that the Austrian government had just approved a new three-year funding program for mediation training and implementation.  At a time when several donor nations have announced they are curtailing their aid to Uganda in the wake of some recent legislation passed by Parliament and signed by the President, Austria has decided to step up to the plate in a big way to assist the Judiciary in its effort to provide more effective and efficient access to justice for its people.  The parameters of that aid package are such that many of my Ugandan friends on the Judiciary are confident that much of the additional training by Pepperdine the Ugandans desperately seek could be funded by this new grant.   

One of our four Pepperdine mediation trainers, Judge Mitchell Goldberg, celebrated his 71^st birthday in style on Tuesday.  The room full of Ugandan judges provided a rousing Ugandan version of happy birthday, as did the room full of attorneys shortly thereafter.  It was quite touching to see how emotionally affected Judge Goldberg was by their warm and sincere wishes to him.  We ended the evening with a birthday dinner at my favorite restaurant in Kampala – the Emin Pasha.  Susan had sneakily bought a birthday cake for the occasion.

Up until earlier this week, I had no idea there were veterinarian doctors in Uganda.  There are relatively few dogs, and almost no cats (other than the big cats roaming the plains in search of antelope), so the need for vets in the capital city of Kampala is quite anemic.  Perhaps that is why this veterinarian doesn’t practice medicine, but is instead the Commissioner General of Prisons in Uganda.  This meeting had been arranged by the Director of Public Prosecution, Mike Chibita, earlier in the week and was aimed at accomplishing several tasks.  The first of which requires a bit of context.

A couple months ago, a judge from Louisiana, after reading Bob Goff’s witty and inspiring book Love Does, called Pepperdine to ask some follow up questions about our Uganda work, which is mentioned in the book.  The judge was routed to me, and we have become long-distance friends.  About a month ago, he sent me a book called Cain’s Redemption that chronicles the pioneering and transformative work on moral rehabilitation of prisoners by warden Burl Cain at the Angola maximum security prison in Louisiana.  My meeting on Thursday morning represented the providential confluence of my work here in Uganda and some proactive thinking by the Louisiana judge.  We have now penciled in a visit of the top Ugandan prison officials to the Angola prison later this year.  They are thrilled at the prospect of learning how to improve the quality of the correctional work they deliver at their 224 prisons.

As always is the case, there are logistical and funding details that need to be worked out, but I have a high degree of confidence this will happen, especially after what I found out at dinner Thursday night.  More on that below.

The second task was to secure the cooperation of the prison system for our continuing work in Uganda prisons.  Since 2010, Pepperdine has been bringing teams to Uganda to assist in the case preparation of prisoners who have been languishing in prison for years and years, just waiting for someone to do something.  No lawyer, no evidence provided against them, no trial date, and even less hope.  The problem is not so much with not caring about the prisoners, but much more about not having the knowledge or resources to deliver timely access to justice.  From early 2010 through mid 2013, our focus was exclusively on the juvenile realm.  Following a measure of success in that context, we turned our sights toward the adults.  Last July, a team of American lawyers, American law students, Ugandan lawyers, and Ugandan law students descended upon Katojo prison in Fort Portal to prepare for trial seventy cases for disposal through plea bargaining.  More on that here.  After Thursday’s meeting, we had the green light from the prisons to step up our efforts by conducting another intensive week of case preparation in late June at Uganda’s maximum security prison called Luzira.

The third (and potentially very exciting topic) of this meeting went according to plan, though we need to get a letter agreement with final permission before I feel comfortable disclosing what this is.  Needless to say, Susan and I left this meeting quite encouraged.

From there, Susan and I met an Austrian who heads the arm of the Dutch government that funds various judicial improvements and training programs.  I have met with her on numerous occasions before, and she told us a bit more about the Austrian mediation grant, buoying our spirits even further.

Before dinner, Susan and I met with the appropriate judicial and prosecutorial figures to finalize the June Luzira prison project from their end.  The meeting couldn’t have gone better.

As is our custom when I am in town, we organized a dinner at the elegant Fang Fang Chinese Restaurant with the Ugandan judges who have previously made the trip to Pepperdine.  These men and women are becoming dear friends and it is always wonderful to spend an evening with them.  But this gathering was extra special because we were joined by a friend of mine who works at the US Embassy.  His day job is to manage a variety of justice system projects, and as a retired police officer, he performs lots of training for the Ugadan police.  He and I had been trying to coordinate our schedules to share a meal, and this was the time that worked out.  He was very pleased to meet the ten or so judges who were able to attend the dinner, at least one of which he has been wanting to meet for a while.

At the dinner, the Embassy official announced a new program the US will be funding that relates directly to the work we are doing, and may very well provide an answer to the prayers we have been offering about how to pay for the aggressive training dreams the Ugandan judges and I have been dreaming about on the criminal side of the ledger.

I went to bed on Thursday with a smile on my face, knowing that two separate governments are allocating substantial resources to the very types of projects we have been delivering and planning to deliver.  We now turn our prayers toward the prospect of our grant proposals being looked upon favorably.  I have a sneaking suspicion that these developments are not the product of random chance or coincidence, but are instead providential confluences of several streams flowing in the same direction – toward efficient and effective justice for Ugandans.