Wheels of Justice, Part VI: "On Appeal"

It was appropriate, the gathering of vultures on the Bank of Baroda building across the street from the Court of Appeals. It was a Thursday in mid-June, and evidently, the birds knew the fate of three defendants hung in the balance, and they awaited the verdict. Through the open windows you could hear their ocassional squawks that mixed with the faint sound of car horns and the high-pitched squeal of brakes, the scrape and smack of construction workers, and the click and hum of the overhead fans that circulated the muggy morning air.

When the three, peroxide-wigged and ornately-robed federal appellate justices entered, those present in the courtroom rise and quickly come to order. Any humor found in their traditional garb evaporates as they peer down from the bench.

"Are you ready to proceed?" the principal judge asked the defense attorney.

"I am not," she says. "I have been unwell and have had other matters in lower courts."

The principal judge removed her glasses with a professorial look of disapproval. "This takes precedent."

Through the attorney's profuse apology, it becomes clear that she is not prepared for the appeal hearing. Whether she has been unwell or her other professional obligations have prevented her from fully preparing, she will not argue the appeal today. The appellate justices, seemingly to their chagrin, declare that the hearing of the appeal will wait until August.

As this declaration is made, the three defendants in the dock look on. Because the proceedings are in English and it is likely the defendants--one woman who looks 40 and two men that are at least ten years her junior--have only a spartan understanding of the official language of the court, they don't react to the words and gavel of the judge. They simply look on, wide-eyed, the meaning of what has just happened an unknown.

A uniformed officer from Luzira Prison collects them and leads them down the stairs to the holding cell before their return to prison at the end of the day. It will be a return to a place they know well.

***

After the courtroom cleared out, I approached the defense attorney who had not been ready to proceed. Because of the noise in the courtroom, it was difficult to understand the nature of the decision being appealed, so I asked her what the case was about. It was a murder case.

More than nine years earlier, according to the attorney, the female defendant had killed her husband in a fit of rage when she discovered that he was having an affair. After stabbing him to death, she chopped up his body in the hopes of feeding it down the hole of a outdoor latrine. When she realized that parts of the body were too big to fit into the hole, she sounded an alarm.

When the police showed up, the woman admitted to taking part in the murder, but also implicated two men--the same men that stood with her as co-defendants.

During the first trial nine years earlier, she contradicted her statement to the police, testifying under oath that she was the only person to have a role in the killing. That testimony, however, was not enough to overcome the earlier accusation. She and the men were convicted of murder and sentenced to life.

It is a curiosity that a murderer who confesses to a crime in court and claims she acted alone would not be sentenced alone. But in Uganda, the fact that she told police upon her arrest that two men were accomplices (a seemingly obvious fabrication from a criminal facing a potentially lengthy sentence) was enough to convince the lower court judge that these two men were involved. The only other evidence implicating the men was the testimony of a witness who said he saw the men "in the area" the night the crime was committed.

But for the last nine years, the men have sat in prison, awaiting their chance to appeal. This is another indicator in the painfully slow justice process of Uganda. As time ages the court record and whittles away at witnesses' memories, two men who have spent nearly a third of their lives in prison must rely on the mercy of three appellate court justices and the abilities of an attorney, who while seemingly well-intentioned, was unprepared to argue their case on the day of their appeal.

From that day back in June until now, they have waited, passing their lives in Luzira Prison, hoping that they will soon be free. Some time next week, barring another delay, the two men will learn their fate.

Roads to Nowhere

"Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads."
-Dr. Emmett Brown, Back to the Future Part II

I don't know if Doc ever took the DeLorean to Uganda in 2009, but he might as well have. Because like Doc and his flying time machine, Ugandans don't need roads either--or more precisely, don't have them. At least not roads in the sense that you or I know them.

The roads of Kampala are generally paved, but they are scarred with axle-breaking potholes. Many of these potholes are large enough to swallow up a small car or motorcycle taxi, and they can delay traffic by turning a two-lane road into a narrow bottleneck.

One such pothole exists at an intersection on my way to work. It is big enough for me to lie down in, and it forces cars that could otherwise gently merge into traffic to come to a complete stop before turning hard into a fast-moving traffic lane. And it is not alone. Big bastards like this are everywhere.

On one late-night motorcycle taxi ride, my driver and I were almost sent sprawling when one crept up out of the darkness and flattened the driver's front tire. He was able to get me back home on the flat tire. I don't know if he was as lucky.

On a busride to Jinja to go rafting, the road from Kampala backed up, bringing traffic to a standstill. The source of the delay was a wide, multi-cratered gash in the road that forced all traffic--in both directions--onto the shoulder, invading a roadside market.

The potholes are comical at first, frustrating upon spending more time in the country, and ultimately emblematic of the gross inefficiency of basic public works projects that are victimized by the greed of government employees who would rather buy cars for themselves than roads for their constituents.

***

I was able to witness the birth of one of these potholes on the street below my apartment over the course of a few days. It was like watching the creation of the universe. From nothing came something.

It began with a slow trickle of water originating in the middle of the street, running down into Kampala Road. It grew over the next day or two until it was a puddle a few feet across that emptied with the splash of wheels running through it, but slowly filled again, its source some unseen force below the tarmac of the street.

The leak went unattended for so long that if you looked at the section of road downhill from its source (which didn't seem to alarm anyone in its first three or four days of life) you would have thought that it was raining.

By the next day, my roommate Dan and I had taken up watching the pothole in the afternoon when we returned from work. Nursing Bell Lagers, we'd excitedly watch to see if cars would run through the pothole, hopefully soaking someone either on a bike or on foot that was unlucky enough to be in the splash-radius. Was this a bit childish? Yes. But also unceasingly entertaining.

Later that night, on the way to the gas station across the street to collect the deposit on the now-empty bottles of Bell, I saw that a group of men were working to fix the leaking pothole. Without any apparent official uniforms or vehicles, the men had sectioned off the street and were shining lights down onto the still leaking pothole.

By the next morning, the leak was no more, and the pothole had been filled with a red, dusty clay that smoothed over the road. Over the following days, the dust slowly hollowed out until it was again a crater, but at least without the leak.

The pothole remained in that state until I left Uganda nearly three weeks later. And it serves as a reminder of the problems the country still faces.

Driving on a highway or surface street in America you take for granted the smooth, paved road. It is a natural and obvious part of our everyday lives that most of us cannot remember being without.

Yet in Uganda, the idea of a paved road or consistently running water or uninterrupted electricity is not a given, but a luxury that citizens still hope for and do not expect.

A young man who worked in the High Court with colleagues of mine has lived in this country for the last ten years of his life. His father is a consultant for the development of roads and highways. The young man, Vuk (pronounced Vook), told us a story of a road project outside Kampala where a company owned by the President's brother had received a contract to pave a new road. After six months and millions of dollars, less than one kilometer had been paved. There were no repercussions for the brother or his company.

The politicians and members of parliament and police chiefs and directors of road development and those lucky enough to be within the long arm of nepotism and cronyism are getting rich and living a life of excess in Uganda. The country's citizens are breaking axles and getting soaked.