Several times, lawyers go to the police station to speak to their clients and they are told that the police investigators responsible for the cases have to accompany them to the cells and must sit through their communication with the clients. If the investigator is not available at the time of the lawyer’s visit, the lawyer will be unable to see the client. This is absolutely ridiculous, but it is true. The officer-in-charge at the cells would tell you that they were given strict instructions to that effect and he would not want to jeopardize his job. One wonders who at the top of the police hierarchy came up with this rule to deny lawyers and their clients a protected confidential communication. Don’t the police study anything at all about this basic principle in the criminal jurisprudence? By this oppressive practice by the Ghanaian police, the police are effectively denying lawyers and their clients a statutory privilege to interact adequately to plan their defence. But, not only that; the police are also contravening Article 19 (2) (e) of the 1992 Constitution and all other relevant provisions of the Constitution and other legislation that prescribe that an accused person must be afforded adequate time and facilities to prepare for his defence. It can never be said that an accused person has been afforded adequate facilities to prepare for his defence when the police investigator who will testify against him (the accused) sits through every meeting of the accused and his lawyer. Actually, when a lawyer visits a client in the prisons, a prison officer also sits through their interaction. As bad as this is, it is somehow better than a police investigator sitting through the meeting when that investigator will testify against the accused during his trial. What is even more ironic is that the police hate to have lawyers present when they interrogate suspects. They want to have exclusive access to suspects, but they don’t want lawyers to have similar privilege with their clients. The Evidence Decree, of 1975 (N.R.C.D. 323), in sections 87 to 118, discusses several privileged information, which a party to a case in court may not be compelled to disclose to a third party. The attorney/client privilege is one of the important privileges designed to encourage suspects to freely, and without fear, interact confidently with their counsel to plan their defence. It is also designed to squarely place the burden of proof on the party who alleges wrongdoing against another. Here, the prosecution on whose part the police are must discharge that burden without necessarily picking any information from the accused person. These protections are not provided for accused persons for nothing. They are provided to somehow check the long arms of governments from harassing citizens, some of who may be innocent of the crimes for which they are charged. These protections are even more far reaching in other jurisdictions than in Ghana. Over here, our lawmakers and the courts have accepted that when a suspect is arrested by the police, he must be merely cautioned that he had the right to remain silent, but he may nevertheless be beaten and tortured to “speak the truth” after which a statement is extracted from him and brought to court to “nail him.” How could we accept the arrangement that a police officer could write a statement for a suspect with another police officer watching as an independent witness? In most cases, all those police officers torture the suspects together because for them, conviction is victory for their efforts and anything they must do to secure conviction is paramount to them. If you watch criminal proceedings in our courts often, you would notice that most of these statements written for suspects by the police end with a sentence that “upon interrogation, the accused confessed to the crime.” If accused persons challenge these statements, the only remedy is for a mini trial to be conducted. In my mind, the mini trials do not help very much. It is just unfair to have a police investigator write a statement on behalf of a suspect with a colleague police officer serving as an independent witness, and they, (the police) together read the statement to the suspect only for the suspect to hear later in court that he had confessed to the crime during interrogation. Can we have these statements on video, or at least on audio tapes, which defence counsel could obtain and transcribe to listen to what exactly transpire at the station? With the kind of arrangement we have now, coupled with the unfortunate perception in Ghana that anyone charged with a crime is prima facie guilty, it is no wonder that those of us devoting our time to help indigent accused persons go through a lot of frustration in hands of the police, and sometimes, the courts. Some of our colleague lawyers even think that accused persons must not be defended by lawyers at all. Prosecutors also dislike us and always want to quarrel with us. Sometimes, we feel like giving up, but someone must be there for those less-privileged accused persons. We have resolved to continue to fight the entire system, hoping that someday, the appropriate reforms shall be made and the Ghanaian folk will have a better realization of why everyone charged with a crime must have counsel to defend him. Go to www.help-law.org.