FEMI OLALEYE AND HIS LIFE SENTENCE

By

JESUTEGA ONOKPASA

The conviction of Dr Femi Olaleye for raping his wife’s niece (therefore his inlaw, indeed his daughter, in the contemplation of African culture) has set me thinking, once more, about jurisprudence.

Dr Olaleye was sentenced to life imprisonment, a sentence many people equate to the death penalty.

On my part, I consider life imprisonment far worse than death.

By the way, I actually support capital punishment but not legalistically, such as once a person is found guilty of a particular crime which carries the death penalty, then they must be sentenced thus and the court cannot impose a lesser penalty.

I’m a proud and unyielding advocate of African Jurisprudence and I believe the punishment must fit the crime but in a customized, rather than in a generalized manner, that is, it is the specific particulars of the crime, itself, as it was committed, that should occasion the punishment imposed, rather than the categorization of the offense, which I consider to be “white man’s jurisprudence” (I very much despise many aspects of non-African, especially European and American jurisprudence, which I consider to be quite savage).

I submit that justice can never be mass-produced but can only be effected on a painstaking case by case basis.

So, for instance, if a girl refuses your advances and you bathed her with acid, permanently disfiguring her, I would advocate that you be sentenced to death, even if she did not die, just as I would have you sentenced to death if you cut off your husband’s organ, even if he survived it.

But, I would not support the death penalty for someone who, upon a charge of armed robbery, robbed their fellowman but did not physically harm them in anyway or could not even had seriously harmed them, such as where the “armed robber” was armed only with a toy gun.

I understand I have what some might consider rather revolutionary perspectives on law but my philosophy of law is that the law must always be reasonable and must never be legalistic.

If you raped a little child, I wouldn’t just charge you with defilement; I would charge you with defilement, I would additionally charge you with assault occasioning grievous harm (physical or psychological are one and the same to me) and, above all, charge you with ATTEMPTED MURDER because, as far as I’m concerned, for an adult to penetrate a child, such as a toddler, for instance, is for such adult to have tried to kill them.

I must also hold that courts, by their very nature, always have what I would call inherent or residual discretion, indeed, regardless of any legal provision to the contrary, for otherwise they would not be courts of justice but clearing houses of injustice.

This is not even revolutionary at all since courts are not at all capacitated to render the unreasonable, effect the absurd, perform cruelty or impose the unusual, inhuman or inhumane.

While, I fully and, without apologies to woke schools of thought, support the death penalty as adumbrated above, I totally reject life imprisonment and consider it extremely cruel, unusual and, indeed, most inhuman, savage and barbaric punishment.

I am no racist; my greatest heroes are the likes of John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr, indeed, I love all people, black and white equally, as all children of God but I think the white man has a jurisprudence that is pretty obtuse and in many of its particulars, downright despicable and irretrievably uncivilized.

California law, for instance, basically rendered the musician, Britney Spears, her father’s slave but I guess that is not all that surprising from a country that built its wealth on the backs of human cargo from Africa.

By the way, at least one of the reasons Lincoln became such an adamant resistor of slavery was because he felt his own father had effectively rendered him a slave.

Many historians hold that slavery was first legally authorized in America upon the permanent indenturement of a certain Punch, who is recorded, per a 1647 Virginia court decree, as the first person of Black African descent to to be legally “enslaved for life” in that country (by the way, this gentleman is said to have been an ancestor of President Barrack Obama on his mother’s side).

There are many drawbacks to what we call “Received English Law” and its vestiges in this country.

At some point (I think in Victorian England), for instance, the British ended up imposing the death penalty on up to two hundred different offenses!

What a charming society of the enlightened!

It was elitist jurisprudence on steroids and I guess one could call it bourgeois lawmaking run amok.

I cannot imagine any council of African elders coming up with such horridness to regulate their community.

Indeed, I firmly believe African jurisprudence is superior to whatever the white man has to offer and I would rather not look to those who replaced the slave plantation with supermax prisons for guidance on law.

I am also quite comfortable with taking a rather dim view of what those who replaced Prima Nocta with the Three Strikes Law have to say about jurisprudence.

I fully believe that life imprisonment is way too indistinguishable from slavery to ever be lawful and I think there’s something very wrong with anyone comfortable with locking up his fellowman for life.

In any case, life imprisonment is selfevidently most repugnant to natural justice, equity and good conscience, therefore totally animalistic and utterly untenable, for it is the hypocrisy of taking a life while pretending not to have done so.

You may ask: “how can the death penalty be okay if life imprisonment is not?”

Well, if you wickedly deprive your fellowman of his life, you divest yourself of the entitlement to your own but that is a whole different kettle of fish altogether from taking your fellowman into custody forever.

I would say the husband who shot the neighbour he caught sleeping with his wife on their matrimonial bed committed a terrible crime but the man who kidnapped the daughter of his fellowman and imprisoned her in his cellar for 13 years is simply subhuman.

In short, while the death penalty clearly fits certain crimes, life imprisonment is just a function of the twistedness of white man’s jurisprudence, indeed, his proclivity for the subjugation of his fellowman, and, as far as I’m concerned, a term of life simply cannot fit any crime whatsoever.

Dr Olaleye emerges before me as some cocky, self-entitled idiot of a truly shameless man who thought he could get away with his shameful excesses but more importantly, I hope and pray for healing and restoration for our little girl that he serially violated and most wickedly took advantage of.

I believe Dr Olaleye should go to jail for his most wicked and unconscionable crime but I do not believe he should spend the rest of his life in prison because that punishment simply does not fit the crime.

Onokpasa, a lawyer, writes from Abuja.