The OSIWA Pretrial Prison Project is the first law clinic project I ever carried out that exposed me to having a one on one interaction with prison officers and the inmates. My experience during the visit to the the Keffi Medium Prison was quite an experience worth telling a thousand and one times. In the process of carrying out this exercise I was able to educate the three inmates I interviewed on what the law clinic is and how it renders legal services on civil matters on pro bono and at the same time able to understand personally that the justice system and its administration in Nigeria needs a lot of Reformation that an individual alone cannot be able to achieve when he/she carries it out single handedly but can thus be greatly accomplished when all and sundry work side by side in accordance to rule of law,equality before the law and the principles of fair hearing which litigation seeks to achieve. With these, we as a team in this pretrial prison project were able to
see that justice is done to the plight of these inmates by making contact to such persons necessary like family,friends,etc helping them in having legal representation which on a good day they cannot afford or are incapacitated to get and we also attended court sittings on the particular cases and at the end of the day one of the inmates got discharged as his case was been struck out as a result of the plaintiff withdrawing his case against him(the inmate). The challenges I faced as a clinician was simply the issue of difficulty in locating the client's contact address and the issue of communication during the interview with one of the client who speaks fluent and a different Hausa tongue. But thanks to my partner Rhema Manga with whom I worked with and was able to understand more of what the client wanted and we were able to help to the best of our
abilities. In conclusion, I completed this task knowing as a fact that I was able to bring to the knowledge of my clients that 'alone' we can do extremely little but 'together' we can do a great deal for it is our motto- together in the strive for justice.
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