AFRAID OF DEFENSE LAWYERS, MUCH?Hassan Mohammed

All of a sudden a lot of people I have a lot of respect for are proving that the respect is misplaced. Some of the commentaries about that Evans lawyer are unbelievably stupid, petulant, impetuous and totally uncalled for.
I’m shocked that people are saying a man, no matter how evil we think he is, should not have lawyers on his corner. These are people who at every opportunity will shout “rule of law”. These people will use every opportunity to remind you that we are in a democracy. But same people want to set same democratic values aside in some situations.
There is a reason why the US Seal Team 6 were ordered to kill Bin Laden because they know that if he was arrested, he will eventually see the inside of a court room, military or civilian, and there will lawyers to defend him, whether they hired by him or are court appointed.
Pol Port had lawyers before he died on his way to trial. Timothy McVeigh had lawyers. Hitler’s right hand man Hermann Göring had lawyers. In this country, Reverend King had lawyers defending him. Kabiru Sokoto also had lawyers. He also sued the FG for his conviction. In fact, in 1980, a man murdered his wife, sliced her into pieces of meat and dumped all the bits into his refrigerator. He had lawyers for that trial. He even got away on account of some insanity bullshit.
So why this outrage? Why the righteous indignation? Why pick on this one lawyer? Well, we are tired of losing. The reason for picking on this lawyer is not because he has a tending for defending some of the most despicable people we have around. It is because of fear. Those who viciously attack him to do because they are afraid he may actually win. Not because of how good he is but how bad our own team of public prosecutors are.
Those that have gone after him, petulantly and impetuously, and have splashed his face and name all over social media are doing that out of real fear of defeat, but are not sincere or courageous enough that to openly admit that it is actually their fears. Hypocrisy and cowardice will not let them come out with the truth.
So, I’ll help them; I mean, you.
Your problem is really not that lawyer that you have shown so much hate all through this week. No! You are just lilly-livered to admit the truth that we have teams of public prosecutors around government that are incredibly incompetent, hardly ever organized or planned around a strategy of winning cases on behalf of the people, and are sometimes complicit in their own defeats.
Some of the cases they lose in court are what some of us will consider as open as shut but they will still go ahead and lose. They drag defeat out of the jaws of clear victories. Sometimes they behave as if they are deliberately losing the cases. I usually suspect them of taking bribe to lose cases by, for example, not avoiding some of the silly and most basic things that they do, which force judges to throw cases out or hand out injunctions staying legal actions like bread.
So, out genuine fear of repeat in the usual prosecutorial behaviour some people are equally behaving like petulant supporters of a football team who go after players of the opposing and attack them for the good players they are, while giving free pass to the dumb players in their team. I use to hate Thiery Henry like that instead of hating the terrible defenders in my team, the same way some do Messi or Ronaldo these days.
Instead of attacking this lawyer alone for doing his job, why not also beam the searchlight on the government lawyers and attack them too? I’m not a lawyer, and I claim to know nothing about the technicalities of our laws, but I know that they are so bad that if the court cases they are losing were in a football league, we would have been relegated to the 4th division by now. It is that bad.
Evans’ case is one of those cases where it should be open and shut. Take the fool to court, the prosecution does the right thing by following due process, no underhand or shortcuts to the law, no torture to extract evidence that will rejected, no illegal searches etc., and not only convict this wicked soul but execute the devil and get him out of our news circle. One very good example is the 90 days right to detain that the police obtain. Any case against the IGP is sure to fail.
His case is one of those where, as damage limitation, his lawyers should be pleading with government to cut deals for him using whatever leverage he has in terms of information about his operations, those other criminals that colluded with him in his evil acts from security officers right down to community members so that instead of killing the idiot, may be he will be jailed for 3,000 years.
But here he is, a man who made billions kidnapping innocent people, and a man on whose behalf his wife and kids shamefully made videos as they cry and plead for his life, now having the gumption to sue the Nigerian state for N300 million for illegal/unlawful detention because he is banking that our prosecutors may have messed something up or is counting on them doing so to mess their own case up.
Admit it! You are afraid, scared shit, that the prosecuting attorneys may bungle it, and you lash out at his lawyer not your idiot team. Stop wasting angst on a lawyer. Stop transferring aggression. Point your fingers at the right people, at those who rather shine on pages of newspapers, TV, radios and social media than preparing very well to win in a damn court. Point your fingers at the government prosecutors. Develop spine and attack your problem.
We need to wake them up from their lazy slumber. If we have dedicated half of the energy we employed in attacking these defence lawyers and judges on these lazy people, may be things will change. May be.