Jail appeals involving nearly 3,000 convicts, some of whose convictions go back 20 years and who are too poor to engage lawyers, remain pending with the High Court.
Individuals convicted of offences by district or metropolitan courts have a right to appeal to the High Court against the conviction.
The convicts who are too poor to engage their own lawyers, however, can appeal to the High Court through the jail superintendent against the conviction.
According to a court official, the 'jail appeal' cases have piled up over 20 years and among them, there are 28 cases that were filed 20 years ago in 1991.
In total, there are 2,903 pending jail appeals, 515 of which were filed more than 10 years ago.
It is not unusual for convicts to have completed their sentences whilst their jail appeal remains pending.
According to a court official, Abdul Hossain Sheikh and his brother Abu Sayeed Sheikh, both sentenced to seven years in prison on June 28, 2001 by an assistant judge in Khulna in a robbery case, filed separate jail appeals through the Khulna central jail authorities on January 26, 2002.
Although the appeals of the two brothers were admitted for hearing on August 25, 2002 with a direction to the trial court concerned to submit its records to the High Court, they could not be heard as the record were not submitted, the official said.
According to the rules, the High Court can dispose of a jail appeal after hearing the state attorney and a lawyer, if any engaged by the state or any legal aid organisation to defend the convict.
If no lawyer is engaged by the state or any organisation, the High Court bench concerned can dispose of a jail appeal after hearing the state attorney only, former High Court judges, who had dealt with the jail appeals, told
New Age on Friday. In that case, the judges of the bench make necessary queries to the state attorney to defend the convict and make a final decision based on the queries and documents of the case, they added.
According to former judges and incumbent court officials, a good number of jail appeals
had been disposed of between 1998 and 2002 when there were either several benches or specific week days for the disposal of such cases.
According to court officials, there is now no specific bench to deal with the jail appeals and the chief justice refers such cases to the High Court judges for their disposal.
In most of the cases, the judges hear the jail appeals in their chambers in the court instead of an open court hearing.
The former judges said that the constitution of separate benches could expedite the disposal of the jail appeals.
In recent practices, the government engages lawyers to defend the convicts in jail appeals by the government-funded National Legal Aid Organisation which was set up in 2000 under the Legal Aid Act 2000.
The organisation's director Syed Aminul Islam said that there were 36 lawyers on the organisation's jail appeal panel.
Supreme Court lawyer Momtazuddin Ahmed Mehedi, the co-coordinator of the panel, told New Age, 'These panel lawyers have little interest in moving move the jail appeals as payment is very low.'
Each lawyer gets only Tk 2,500 after disposing of a jail appeal and the organisation took one or two months to pay the bill after submission, he said.
'Panel lawyers have to face various difficulties in dealing with the appeals as they do not earn sufficient money in the cases to pay off the court officials necessary to expedite process,' Mehedi added.
Aminul, however,
said that there was a proposal currently with
the finance ministry to increase the lawyer's fee to Tk 4,000.
He also said that many jail appeals remained pending as the cases were not ready for hearing because of the negligence of court officials.
Court officials, however, said that they were often not able to prepare the papers for a hearing as the lower courts did not send them the records because in the meantime co-convict/s in the same case had engaged a private lawyer and the records were already sent to another bench.
The Supreme Court Bar Association secretary, M Bodruddoza Badal, said, 'We can provide free legal assistance to convicts by engaging our members if the chief justice or the Supreme Court registrar requests the association to move the jail appeals now pending for years.'
In the last 10 years, the National Legal Aid Organisation has been able to get 1,068 individual jail appeals disposed of although it has no figures for how many of these were successful. 'About a half of them are successful,' said its director.
One unsuccessful case involved Ful Miah, who was sentenced to seven years in prison by a special tribunal in Sunamganj in September 2007 on charges of possessing 15 bottles of the drug Phensedyl (codeine) syrup. Four years after filing his appeal through the jail authorities, his conviction was upheld by the High Court.
Aminul told New Age that the National Legal
Aid Organisation is planning to set up an office at the Supreme Court to increase awareness of the organisation's activities regarding providing legal assistance.
'Because of lack of publicity in the provision of free legal aid, the organisation's activities had not attracted many lawyers,' the director added.
Apart from the government-run legal aid organisation, there are some other leading non-governmental organisations such as the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust, Ain o Salish Kendra, and Madaripur Legal Aid Organisation providing free legal aid.
The organisations, however, deal with very few jail appeal cases.
The NLAO director said that the government had allocated Tk 1 crore in favour of the organisation in the outgoing financial year and that in 2010, it had spent Tk 61.57 lakh on providing legal aid at the district and Supreme Court level.
Source: New Age
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