Sweet Sixteen

I did something on Wednesday I never thought I would do and hope to never do again.  But I couldn’t help myself – it was a necessary compromise of my otherwise firmly held beliefs.

While a few of my colleagues have long since jettisoned their suits and ties when they teach, I have remained a traditionalist.  There is something about legal education that cries out to me for professional attire, which is why I never thought I would find myself wearing light, waterproof, zipper-laden safari wear as I taught my last Remedies class of the semester.  My students were as shocked as I was.  But the last flight out of LAX on Wednesday that would land me at the Entebbe International Airport on Thursday night departed just over two hours after my class.  So I hopped an Uber taxi straight from class and got to the airport just in time.

LAX à Detroit à Amsterdam à Entebbe.

While this twenty-seven hour journey certainly sucks, I mind it less than others because I am able to get quite a bit of uninterrupted work done, and because my friends in Big Pharma have provided me with an effective body-clock adjuster – Ambien.  My trusted driver/friend Tango was waiting for me at the airport with a big smile and hearty “Welcome back.”  By 1:00 a.m. on Friday morning, I was comatose at the Mosa Court Apartments where I will spend the next eight nights, and where my students will spend eight weeks this summer.

By 7:30 a.m., however, I was seated at the Kabira Country Club for a Consensus Building Workshop on plea bargaining.  Among the sixty attendees were Ugandan High Court and Magistrate Judges, prosecutors for the Department of Public Prosecutions, wardens at several Ugandan prisons, one prisoner who had benefited from the introduction of plea bargaining, representatives of donor nations who have been funding aspects of the plea bargaining initiative, a handful of members of the Ugandan press, and two judicial officials from Zambia who are studying best practices in plea bargaining for their country.

The Principal Judge of Uganda (head of the trial court system) presided over the gathering and invited me to address the crowd about how plea bargaining in Uganda got started – two Pepperdine students with an idea.  Most of what I said, however, consisted of words of encouragement and admiration for how Ugandans were building and implementing a system that accounted for their culture, desires, and resources.

Over the course of the six hours, we marched through the Plea Bargaining Practice Direction that appears set to be issued soon by the new Chief Justice.  This document will govern the procedures and practices of plea bargaining in Uganda and serves a pre-cursor to formal legislation that will likely follow in the next year or two.  The provisions that garnered the most discussion had been hammered out over the course of a week in Malibu about a year ago with the assistance of Pepperdine Professors Carol Chase and Harry Caldwell and a handful of Pepperdine alums.

At the end of the day, a strong consensus emerged among the wide-ranging members of the Ugandan judicial sector and everyone left happy.  The highlight of the conference, for me, was the heartfelt speech made by one of the prisoners our Pepperdine team worked with last summer.  A team of consisting of two Pepperdine students, one Pepperdine lawyer, one Ugandan law student, and one Ugandan lawyer had met with him in Murchison Bay Prison (part of the Luzira complex) and had prepared his case for resolution through plea bargaining.

He shared that he had been arrested three years earlier and had simply sat in prison waiting for something to happen – no lawyer, no court date, and no clue what would happen next.  Our summer project finally allowed him to meet with a lawyer, accept responsibility for his crime, and receive the sentence he is now serving.  He was overflowing with gratitude for the fact that he now knew when he would be going home.  He said that the anxiety associated with waiting for court and not knowing what his future held had been the worst part of being in prison.

As I write this on Saturday morning, I am sitting next to Tango staring out a long stretch of road that will, in five hours, take me to Ishaka, where Henry is attending medical school at Kampala International University.  I first met Henry in January of 2010 when he was a sixteen year-old prisoner in a juvenile remand home waiting for his day in court.  I was a wide-eyed Torts professor sure that this was the only trip to Africa I would ever make.  My, how things have changed.  This is my sixteenth trip to Uganda, but it will be my first to this part of the country.

More tomorrow.  Thanks for reading and thanks for your prayers.