Govs’ refusal to sign death warrants causing more crimes

The Assistant Chief Legal Officer, Office of the Public Defender (OPD), Kwara State, Rashidat Mustapha, has identified the high crime rate in the country to the refusal of state governors to sign the death warrant for those on death roll.

Mustapha said most Nigerians now believed that they could get away with heinous crimes even when they were caught because no one would sign their death warrant.

Speaking with North Central Trust in Ilorin, Mustapha said just one public execution would serve as deterrent to other criminals, indicating that Nigeria had laws that were still working.

She said, “But because some of our governors are too corrupt, they are unwilling to sign any death warrant. It is the failure of government to execute death sentences on those convicted by the Supreme Court that is responsible for the high crime rate in the country.

“Even when some of them end up in prison, those with death sentences; many of them later get pardoned and return to the society to recruit others to cause more havoc.”

She pointed out that Nigerian correctional centres needed total reformation in order to be suitable to cater for inmates, adding that most ex-inmates came out from the centres worse than they went in.

According to her, “I represented a case of a young man who had been in prison for about 20 years. While there, they considered him upright to the extent that he became their imam in the prison.

“He beguiled everyone, and after the recommendation of his good conduct by prisons officials, he was pardoned. But unfortunately, within his first month outside the walls, he was sent back. He went back to his old ways because our correctional authorities seem failing in their main duty.

“Government should train and engage the ex-inmates in order to make them useful to themselves and the society; preventing them from going back to their old ways.”

She also decried the issue of broken homes, saying, “Youths are the leaders of tomorrow they say, but peer pressure and ill-exposure lead many to series of unimaginable acts of misbehaviour and crimes while in school.

“From robbery to rape, theft to stealing, cultism to gangsterism, a very big percentage of all cases we have handled are young people.”