Kaduna to free 600 prisoners
Kaduna State Ministry of Justice will this week embark on an exercise to decongest prisons in the state.
Addressing a press conference yesterday, the Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice, Garba Uba Shehu, said during the exercise, consideration will be given to inmates charged with capital offences including rape, kidnapping, armed robbery and culpable homicide among others.
According to him, there are over 600 inmates awaiting trial for capital offences in various prisons in the state.
“We have received a comprehensive list of inmates from the prison authority for consideration and we have received all the case dairies from the police. So, we are only waiting for the exercise to commence,” he said.
He recalled that at the end of the first phase of the decongestion exercise, which spanned through a period of three months, a total of over 300 awaiting inmates held for minor offences were released from various prisons in the state.
“Out of the 300 inmates that were released, only one person returned to prison for a different offence. One of the problems detected during the first phase of the exercise was that police officers in charge of investigation are very slow in carrying out their duties and this is due to constraints the force is facing. So, we are trying to see if we can amend some of these laws to make dispensation of justice quick right from the investigation stage,” he said.
He therefore urged people of the state to reciprocate government’s gesture by being law abiding.