Provide rational information on court proceedings in the couuntry of Nigeria

Demographic Factors

Over the holiday, I spent most of it on vacation, in one of the African countries. The exact country name is Nigeria. The country is located in the west of Africa with a general population of over 180 million citizens. The majority of the population is the youth with over 70% of the total population ranging between 1-30 years of age. The total dependency ratio stands at 88.2 with youth dependency being 83. Almost half of the country population is in the urban center with an annual rate of urbanization being 4.4%. The crime rate stands at 5.7% in urban areas (Chawki, Darwish, Khan, & Tyagi, 2015).

Social Factors

Poverty; in Nigeria, more than seventy-one percent of the citizens are living in poverty. This is because a large population of Nigerians can’t afford to eat three quality meals per day. Living in the right and healthy surrounding is a big problem for most Nigerians. This contributes to the highest percentage of problems like crimes more especially in the cities.

Insecurity and insurgencies; it goes beyond doubt that the insecurity cases in Nigeria are very high due to the massive gap between the rich and the poor. The presence of groups like Boko Haram insurgency is the evidence of insurgency in Nigeria. All this have contributed significantly to most of the Nigerians living in fear due to property and live destruction.

Corruption; the high levels of corruption cases has significantly broken the system meant to unify the Nigerians as one thing. The presence of crime in every level of Nigeria has dramatically contributed to other Nigerians feeling inferior in their own country. This is also a massive contributor to criminal cases being witnessed in Nigeria.

Poor standards of education and illiteracy: As a result of corruption and reckless governance has contributed significantly to the decline in education levels in Nigeria. It is paining when more than half of the female population in Nigeria can’t read nor write. Illiteracy levels can be proved from even the individuals who can read and write to be very poor. Also, many individuals luck professional skills to enable them to perform better in society. This shows the cause of poor living conditions and high dependency levels in Nigeria (Okunola, Rowley, & Johnson, 2017).

Political Factors

Tribalism; this is a huge disease in the politics of Nigeria that has remained uncured for many years. Most of the Nigerian leaders are voted on a trial basis. This leads to the fact that if a leader commits a crime in Nigeria, citizens from his or her tribe forgive the mistakes but from another tribe point of view, it remains to be a mistake hence the source of tribal clashes besides ganging up of terrorist groups.

Religion; in Nigeria, different religions are spread all over the nation. The problem with religion is that individual from a major religious group usually fights each other for power. They vote for the political aspirants according to belief without taking into consideration the developmental capability and record of the politicians. This significantly contributes to poor leadership in Nigeria (Akpabio, & Udofia, 2017).

Economic Factors

Highest interest rate; generally the interest rates in Nigeria are very high, and as a result, this causes distortions in the economy. This further reduces the growth of business besides stopping the consumers from borrowing to finance the development of real estates. This greatly affects the Nigeria economy.

Poor infrastructure; lack of constant power supply besides transportation networks hinders most businesses and investors from excelling. For instance, many industries require the use of power for production and good transport networks to supply the produced products; however, due to lack of these systems in Nigeria, it dramatically influences its economy negatively.

Terrorist groups: The Nigerian economies have significantly been negatively affected due to terrorist activities in the country. The existence of terror groups undermines the security of investors in Nigeria. New investors fear investing their money in Nigeria only to be destroyed by terrorists and on the other hand, the already existing investors are taking away their investments out of Nigeria as they term it insecure country to invest. This has dramatically impacted negatively on Nigeria in terms of economic development and growth (Akpabio et al. 2017).

Examine how your chosen country’s criminal code would likely view the crime you witnessed. Provide a rationale for the response.

According to the Nigerian criminal code, in the crime I witnessed where a 15 years old child raped a fellow minor aged 9 years, the accused is still a minor, and he should be forced to go through a reformation. Under Nigeria criminal code, he is considered to be arrested until proved fit to be in the society again. He will remain in rehabilitation until the experts in medical and psychological report certify him okay to be rereleased to the community as most criminal laws propose. The reason for saying so is that the state laws cannot destroy the life of a child because he committed a crime. That is why reformation is the remedy of such a child.

Choose two (2) individual rights that the United States grants criminal suspects, such as search and seizure, right to counsel, etc., and analyze the country’s perspective on each power. Provide support for the analysis.

Concerning Nigeria’s criminal procedure, two characteristics differentiate it from that of the United States. The two are;

 Preliminary examination of the accused by the judge

 Interrogatory by the presiding judge of the trial court.

The above was constitutionally enacted in Nigeria under the regime of President Olusegun Obasanjo which was copied from French's that is called, restrain the right to silence. This law gives the judges and juries the mandate to intentional as a sign of guilt both a defendant’s let down to answer police requests throughout the questioning and the lawbreaker to swear through the trial time (de Santana & Williams, 2017).

Investigate how the police in your chosen country would likely treat the defendant. Provide justification for the response.

The Nigerian police treated the defendant that raped the little child like an adult. However, the defendant was just 15 years old. In Nigeria, it's routine to handle the 15-year-old child that has committed a crime like this as an adult, and he will serve to the accusations as an adult. This is evident from what happened to the boy after being taken to court over rape charges; he was finally arrested (Politi, 2017).

Classify the fundamental similarities and differences between the police culture in your chosen country compared to the United States.

Under political level, both the United States of America and Nigeria have a universal suffrage age of 18 years. The United States and Nigeria have one fundamental difference in democratic governance. The difference is that the United States has a drafted and the written rule of law which gives clarity to the rights of its citizens while Nigeria does not have that written constitution (Heller, 2017).

References

Akpabio, E. M., & Udofia, E. I. S. (2017). Unsafe water, sanitation, and hygiene in Nigeria's public spaces: the political economy angle. International journal of water resources development, 33(2), 310-325.

Chawki, M., Darwish, A., Khan, M. A., & Tyagi, S. (2015). 419 scam: an evaluation of cybercrime and criminal code in Nigeria. In Cybercrime, Digital Forensics and Jurisdiction (pp. 129-144). Springer, Cham.

de Santana Gordilho, H. J., & Williams, K. (2017). Introducing consensual criminal justice in Brazil. Revista Brasileira de Direitos Fundamentais & Justiça, 11(36), 35-50.

Heller, K. J. (2017). What Is an International Crime:(A Revisionist History). Harv. Intel LJ, 58, 353.

Okunola, O. M., Rowley, J., & Johnson, F. (2017). The multi-dimensional digital divide: Perspectives from an e-government portal in Nigeria. Government Information Quarterly, 34(2), 329-339.

Politi, M. (2017). The International Criminal Court and the Crime of Aggression. Routledge.