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Who
supervises Chief Justice Johnnie N. Lewis?
Wednesday,
October 31, 2007
By Tewroh-Wehtoe Sungbeh
If I were in
Liberia today, I probably would be sent to the
notorious Monrovia Central South Beach prison
immediately for writing this article, for misspelling
the name of Chief Justice Johnnie N. Lewis; “for
giving him wrong and inappropriate titles” and will
also be locked up “for attaching his photos to
stories that have nothing to do with him.”
That
is the troubling and fuzzy world of one of the most
powerful government officials in the Republic of
Liberia, and supposedly one of its best and bright
legal minds whose naked arrogance and abuse of power
seems to be undermining the nation’s road to
democracy, and the rule of law the Chief Justice swore
under oath to protect and defend when he was appointed
to the office by President Sirleaf over a year ago.
Chief Justice Johnnie N. Lewis
In the presence of other justices of the
Supreme Court, Mr. Lewis recently lectured and sternly
warned his potential preys, journalists, who often get
no respect in Liberia about what he intends to do to
them if they did not refer to him in future articles
as “The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of
Liberia, His Honor Johnnie N. Lewis.”
“This
is your last warning, I am calling on you to desist or
be charged with contempt, which is punishable by 30
days at South Beach. Maybe after spending 30 days at
South Beach you would be responsible journalists,”
he admonished them.
As if the journalists were in school and
summoned before a no nonsense teacher after getting in
trouble, Mr. Lewis, according to reports ordered his
clerk to give each journalist a sheet of paper to
write down his full name and title for them to
remember, and admonished them to behave accordingly,
else, they will bear the brunt of Johnnie N. Lewis’
supreme power.
My God, my God, I thought those days were
behind us by now! I thought the days of intimidation
and harassment at the hands of an insecure government
official whose interpretation and execution of the
laws of the land is not solely based on the written
laws of the land, were behind us.
How dare people forget so quickly and so
easily, especially after all we as a nation and people
experienced over the years; and after what even Mr.
Lewis himself encountered during the senseless civil
war that killed his fellow countrymen and women and
sent him into self-imposed exile for many years, until
he was recently chosen by Pres. Sirleaf to be Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court of Liberia.
So if the Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court of Liberia behaves like a thug, way beneath the
dignity of the highest court of the land intimidating
and violating the rights of working and non-working
Liberians and our friends in our midst, how can we
trust this guy to move beyond his myopic
interpretation of the law from a personal perspective
to a public one?
If this guy as Chief Justice, who is by now
a national disgrace cannot be fired because of his
lifetime appointment, there should be an exception to
the rule to have a national referendum that will allow
the citizens of Liberia to have a say; or there ought
to be a call to rewrite the clause that prohibits his
removal on constitutional grounds so that this
‘inoperable cancer’ that is Johnnie N. Lewis can
be removed aggressively under exigent circumstances,
because his arrogance and disrespect of the law casts
a blurry eye on the Supreme Court.
However, the time is also ripe for
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to instill confidence
in the Liberian people and the legal profession by
addressing the conduct of the Chief Justice, which
occurred on her watch so that the Liberian people will
have confidence in the judiciary whose image many
thought would have been enhanced by the appointment of
Mr. Lewis.
The call for presidential intervention is
crucial for the fact that the highest law enforcement
officer of the land, the person who supposed to be the
final and impartial enforcer of the laws of the land,
abused the laws of the land by using his official
power to intimidate and insult Liberians he believed
to be weak and helpless.
But will this president known for her
extreme loyalty to her friends and employees ever find
the courage to use her power and influence to address
this thorny issue, a sensitive issue of this kind
regarding the abuse of journalists and the total
disregard of press freedom, in a country whose history
of tyranny has never been too kind to working
journalists?
This is also the time for the nation’s
many human rights groups – the ones that will
quickly jump out of the woods to grandstand about what
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is doing and what she is not
doing, ever step up to the plate to address the
conduct of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of
Liberia? By the way, what is the Press Union of
Liberia saying or doing about what happened to their
members at the hands of the Chief Justice?
The senseless civil war that was waged for
close to two decades in my honest opinion can be
blamed on the arrogance and nasty attitude of people
like Johnnie Lewis and his kind, whose condescending
outlook of others who don’t act, speak or look like
them drew us closer to extermination as a people and
nation.
Can you imagine this guy’s attitude as a
young Circuit Court Judge in Greenville, Sinoe County,
during those (President Tolbert) days, right after he
graduated from Yale law school in the United States
decades ago? I can just imagine what our people –
the Liberian people went through those days with
Johnnie N. Lewis holding the gavel.
Who supervises him, anyway?
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