Frank Caprio, a model judge to Nigerian Judiciary — Olaopa 

The Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has urged the Nigerian judiciary to embrace as its model Frank Caprio, the American judge who recently died.

Olaopa made the appeal on Saturday in a tribute to the judge who was affectionately acknowledged as the “nicest judge in the world” for the compassion which he displayed in his courtroom. 

Referring to Judge Caprio’s programme, “Caught in Providence”, Olaopa said that he displayed an unusual level of compassion, empathy and humour that drew millions of viewers to the administration of justice.

According to Olaopa, Frank Caprio carried his humane perspective into public life. 

He said the late judge served the American public all his life, even in those instances when he failed to achieve his dream of becoming, for example, the Attorney General of Rhode Island. “But when he finally settled on being a judge at the Providence Municipal Court, he made up his mind to reform the administration of justice, and to do so while the whole world was watching and following him through the judicial process.”

To Olaopa, this was a bold move for two significant reasons. “The first is that justice and its administration are complex things. And they are made even more complex by their relationship with the ideological politics that is at play within any polity. The democratic system of government allows for the separation of powers, which requires that the executive, legislature and judiciary must be separated in order to enable checks and balances. 

“However, we know that in practice, this is often a sham. The government is often interested in the kind of judgement that the court passes, and even more so in how the court should pass such judgments. The second reason for Caprio’s courage with his mediatised program is that he signalled himself into the public consciousness as a public servant without a secret,” he said.

Olaopa noted that Judge Frank Caprio was critically situated as a public servant in the justice department. 

According to him, this is because justice is key to the understanding of the political health of a state. Olaopa quoted Wole Soyinka, who captured the essence of the role of justice when he observed that justice is the first condition of humanity. 

“The implication of this, for any political regime, is that the idea of justice indicates the imperative of fair treatment that is devoid of racial, income, gender, ethnic biases. In other words, a stable political community is founded on the capacity of that community to achieve the fair treatment of all; the framework that allows benefits and burdens to be shared according to some fairness principle,” he said.

Stressing the ennobling quality of justice that the American judge delivered, Olaopa stated :  “For Judge Caprio, justice cannot be blind of the personal and often constricting circumstances of those who are brought into his courtroom. The idea of social justice demands more than Lady Justice dishing out brute judgments behind a veil. He dispensed justice with a firm belief in the inherent goodness of people. In Judge Frank Caprio’s courtroom, the natural law philosophy trumps the positive law. Natural law encodes a belief in the possibility of moral virtues inherent in human nature. Positive law, on the other hand, dispenses with the possibility of morality in the dispensation of justice. It is that warmth, compassion and empathy that exemplifies Judge Caprio as the very embodiment of social justice.”

 Noting that “in a world racked by inequalities and injustices, what could be more elevating than a judge who tempered justice and judgment with humanness, and fairness which comes wrapped with empathy and even humor?”  Olaopa  specifically cited two instances: ” In a case where a motorist was caught running the traffic light, Judge Caprio dismissed the ticket on the condition that the student must finish college. The judge dismissed a case against a man who just had brain surgery, and in that case, he was more concerned about the health of the recovering man. In many of these cases, judgments were dispensed with humanness and kindness and all-round laughter in the courtroom. Judge Frank Caprio saw people in his courtroom rather than just cases with numbers and statistics. Judge Caprio gave presence to Abraham Lincoln’s observation: ‘I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.’ There is no point, in other words, to damage the humanity or the future of a person based on one infraction.”

Thus , for Olaopa, it would seem that Judge Caprio was always leveraging the spirit, rather than the form and letter, of the law. “And so, it was that Judge Frank Caprio wrote his own epitaph of immortality while he was still alive; he left an indelible memory on the hearts not just of those whose cases were dispensed with kindness and humaneness, but also millions who subscribed to his channel and followed his career as a good judge”, Olaopa added.

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