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Foreign Correspondent: Oct 7

Sally Sara is in Kenya where an unorthodox justice program sees criminals without legal aid learning how to represent themselves.

2014-10-05_2147Foreign Correspondent’s Sally Sara is in Kenya where an unorthodox justice program sees criminals without legal aid learning how to represent themselves and potentially overturn their cases.

What can you do when a dysfunctional, often corrupt and malevolent justice system sees you charged with a crime you claim you never committed, denies you adequate legal support then puts you inside a violent, Dickensian prison for the rest of your life?

In Kenya, you can either accept your fate or fight. In this remarkable, access-all-areas journey through some of the country’s toughest jails, we examine an unorthodox program enabling convicts to school themselves in criminal law and become advocates aiming to set themselves and other inmates free. And don’t think they’re being set up to fail. They’ve put together a pretty imposing record, winning 3,500 cases in the past decade.

Wilson Harling Kinyua is serving a life sentence inside one of Africa’s toughest jails – Kamiti Maximum Security prison in Nairobi, Kenya. He’s been there for 16 years. The way he tells it, he was an innocent bystander as an armed robbery played out nearby.

But that’s not how the authorities saw it. He was arrested and charged for being involved. Without access to a lawyer and unable to call on a character witness to vouch for his honesty, the young college student was convicted and despatched to Kamiti where he’s protested his innocence ever since.

But without a legal-aid system and with a critical shortage of lawyers and a courts choked with an insurmountable backlog of cases there wouldn’t appear to be much hope of Harling ever overturning his conviction and regaining his freedom.

Unless of course he was encouraged and enabled to make the case himself.

Harling is one of many inmates who’ve taken the opportunity to learn about criminal law, participate in mock trials and review and critique judgments to become effective and persuasive paralegals.

It’s a phenomenon sweeping Kenya’s prisons, relieving the pressures on the nation’s legal system and that’s seeing profound injustices corrected, convictions quashed and prisoners who might’ve languished unrepresented for epic jail terms, set free.

Foreign Correspondent’s Sally Sara goes behind bars to explore this unorthodox yet wildly successful criminal justice program working from the inside out.

She gains access to prisoners-turned-paralegals, supporters of the program like Kenya’s Chief Justice and to its architect and principal promoter, one of the highest ranking women in the Kenyan Prison Service, Wanini Kireri.

Tuesday 7 at 8pm on ABC.

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