Arrested For Wearing Slippers: Nigerian Teenager Freed After 4 Years In Prison Without Trial

He went to jail for wearing slippers.

A Lagos-Nigerian teenager, whose name has been withheld, has finally breathed the air of freedom after spending nearly four years behind bars for allegedly wearing slippers similar to those of a complainant.

NOP NIGERIA reports that his bizarre ordeal began in 2022 when he was arrested and remanded in custody. For months, he was locked up without ever seeing the inside of a courtroom.

The teenager’s fate would have remained buried inside the walls of the Medium Security Correctional Centre if not for a routine visit by human rights lawyers.

In January 2024, the legal team of Citizens Gavel, a non-governmental organisation, discovered him during a prison outreach. They found not one, but two men who had been dumped in custody since 2022 without trial.

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“Their ordeal came to our attention in January 2024 during a visit to the Medium Security Correctional Centre, where our legal team in Lagos interviewed them and discovered that, despite having been arrested since 2022, they had never been taken to court,” Citizens Gavel revealed.

What followed was a frantic paper chase. The lawyers tracked the phantom case file to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and eventually traced it to the court of Justice Coker.

Citizens Gavel formally took up the case in March 2024 and began what would become a long courtroom battle for a boy who was arrested for slippers.

From March 2024, the organisation appeared before Justice Coker more than seven times. Each time, the court adjourned. Each time, the prosecution failed to do one simple thing — produce a single witness.

“From then on, we continued appearing before Justice Coker on more than seven occasions for trial and filed several applications urging the court to strike out the case despite all the adjournments and the prosecution failing to produce a single witness,” the group said.

The case has sparked outrage over Nigeria’s criminal justice system, where countless poor Nigerians languish in correctional centres for years awaiting trial for minor or trumped-up allegations.

For the teenager, the slippers that took his freedom have now given him a second chance. After almost four years in custody without trial, he has finally walked out of prison — a free man.

NOP NIGERIA