By Godfrey Olukya 21-5-2013
Sierra Leone’s office of the prosecutor has passed out 50 police prosecutors after specially training them for two days at Kingtom Police Barracks.
The exercise which is part of the office of prosecutor’s ongoing effort to build capacity in Sierra Leone’s judicial sector is to go a long way in improving court cases management in the country.
The training was led by Special Court trial lawyer Mohamed Bangura, who recently returned home to Freetown after participating in the prosecution of former Liberian President Charles Taylor in The Hague.
The prosecutor’s office had previously conducted trainings of police prosecutors in the Northern, Eastern and Southern Provinces and in the Western Area of Sierra Leone as part of a legacy programme which first started in2009.
Bangura noted that criminal prosecutions in the Magistrates Courts are normally conducted by police officers, not lawyers, and that a failure to follow the proper procedures might result in cases being dismissed from court.
He said,’In our trainings we generally target police officers who are new to police prosecutions, since the longer-serving police prosecutors often have learned the proper procedure through experience over the years.’
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