After spending weeks in Luzira prison serving the six months prison sentence resulting from contempt of Court charges for annoying Buganda Road Chief Magistrate Ritah Kidasa Wanyama, city lawyer Derrick Wanyama has apologized and has been set free.
Ono Bwino reported that Kidasa imprisoned Mugoya after he refused to apologize to her after annoying her when he was protesting her decision where she directed him to leave the bar because he did not have a valid practicing license.
Mugoya then insisted that he is not responsible for the delay in renewing of his practicing license noting that he filed his application for renewal months back and has been making follow-ups but Uganda Law Council which is mandated to issue practicing licenses to lawyers has been asking him to wait.
He told Kidasa that her decision was unfair to his client who used his hard-earned money to hire him to give him legal services. He pleaded to be allowed to proceed to represent his client while he followed up with the release of his renewed practicing license which the magistrate declined to offer.
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He insisted that her decision was placing a scar on his career because the client is going to tell other potential clients that he didn’t study law and he is not qualified to represent clients in court.
He was briefly detained in Court cells and when he was summoned back to Court, the magistrate gave him an offer to apologise so that he is not given a custodial sentence which he declined to take insisting that if the magistrate wants to imprison him because of not having a practicing license, let her do so, which she did.
However, after being compromised by Uganda Law Society leadership including a relative to Kidasa, Mugoya agreed to apologise to the magistrate as the only option to survive serving six months in prison and he was released.
It is a practice for lawyers who appear before Kidasa to first present their valid practising licenses. She explained that in doing so, she is protecting the legal practice as a trade from masquerades who are getting money from people to represent them in court yet they are not licensed lawyers.
She noted in one of her court sittings that it is a sign of laziness for a lawyer to reach May without a practicing license noting that the problem is that most of them apply for renewal late that is why the Uganda Law Council delays in issuing them with new ones.
