ABSTRACT Imprisonment serves several universal functions, including the protection of the society, the prevention of crime, retribution against criminal and rehabilitation of inmates. Additional goal of imprisonment may include the assurance of justice based on a philosophy of just desserts (getting what one deserves) and the reintegration of inmates in the community following their sentence. In the Nigerian Prison System, discharge of prisoners after servin...
ABSTRACT It is vital to the correct understanding of the criminal law of Nigeria to ascertain at outset whence that law derives and where it is to be found. Essentially, Nigerian criminal law is derived from English common law. But the present relationship between those two systems of law has tended to become confused. Right from the creation of the earth by the Almighty there has been the existence of law. Law is a rul...
ABSTRACT The inevitability of death makes the law of inheritance so significant in the life of man. Thus, every society or nation has the rules and regulations guiding the sharing of estates left behind by the deceased. These rules and regulations, as a matter of long usage, become a binding law in a society and such law is referred to as customary law. However, the imperfection in man's thinking makes the customary law to be imperfect and inappropriate in sharing the estates left behind by t...
EVIDENCE OF CHARACTER 1.0 EVIDENCE OF CHARACTER: Character evidence is a term used in the law of evidence to describe any testimony or document submitted for the purpose of proving that a person acted in a particular way on a particular occasion based on the character or disposition of that person. The logical function of character evidence may be shown by the following illustration. If a man is accused of stealing, his reputation as a thief logically weighs heavily against h...
HEARSAY EVIDENCE Hearsay Evidence “It’s all about the he said she said bullshit” – Limp Bizkit “Believe only half of what you see, little of what you read, and nothing of what you hear” – old saying. Hearsay often seems to be a very slippery creature, hard to grasp and hold long enough to look clearly at, analyse and or understand. Hearsay may often seem to be perfectly obvious, crystal clear, in some circumstances, and then in others it may suddenly turns opaque, and s...
OPINION EVIDENCE An expert has been defined as ‘a person with the status of an authority (in a subject) by reason of special skill, training or knowledge; a specialist’. Similarly, an expert witness has been described as ‘one who has made the subject upon which he speaks a matter of particular study, practice or observation: and he must have a particular and special knowledge of the subject’ Instructively, on the other hands an opinion may be given by a witness as an expe...
