PANORAMA: Why Museveni is placing cart before the horse with bail reforms
President Museveni’s ongoing push to tighten the current court bail and police bond system arguing that it is contributory to the miscarriage of justice for capital offences has in the last weeks elicited flak from all quarters. Averagely, according to police crime reports, some 40,000 capital offences including aggravated defilement, murder, rape, kidnapping with intent to murder, armed robbery, treason, and terrorism, are recorded every year. Contradictory, only a fraction of those cases are disposed of—from investigations to conviction—owing to several factors, including finance and human resource constraints. In the current financial year, the police’s budget for investigations and crime intelligence stands at a paltry 21 billion Shillings, which means the criminal investigations department can conclusively investigate about 10,000 cases at an average of 2.1 million Shillings per case, With such and other problems like embedded corruption plaguing the country’s criminal justice system, why is the Executive pushing the bail reforms so hard?