American Deported To Nigeria Charged for Loitering, Knows Fate Wed

What will make a country like USA. deny its citizen access to its embassy, and alert the police to arrest and press a charge against her law abiding citizen with legitimate intentions, and without any threat to it, especially when it is the only hope of saving his life? Does it now means any black man who commits a crime anywhere in the world is a Nigerian?

The answers we may only find after a Lagos Magistrate Court, Ebute-Metta, Lagos, Nigeria, which fixed Wednesday, November 21, 2007  for ruling in a case brought against a black American Mr. Grayson Ernest Eugene who was serving a jail term in the United States before his deportation to Nigeria in error by the American government on December 12, 2006 delivers its judgement.

Eugene, 44, is standing trial before Magistrate R.O. Davis on a one-count charge of “an act not warranted by law” which “causes inconvenience or damage to the public by loitering around American Embassy premises.”

Lead counsel to the accused person from Sola Adabonyan & Co, Mrs  Cordelia Chigozie Anyanwu,  told the court at the resumed hearing  Friday that the accused person, being an American citizen on  wrongful deportation to Nigeria, a country where he has no relative and has never visited all his life, had no where else to go than the American Embassy, having found himself in Nigeria for no fault of his. She argued that the American Embassy, or any other embassy for that matter, being the property of  citizens of that country, was the only place her client, like any other sensible person, should have gone to in the circumstance.

She submitted that the accused person  was not criminally liable as he is a victim of circumstances, stressing that it is shocking and pathetic for her client to be uprooted from the only home he knows just because of the colour of his skin, which he has no control over and that the accused person was acting on the belief that he had every right to be at the American Embassy as an American citizen in accordance with the American Constitution, 14th amendment section 1.

The counsel told the court that her client had given his social security number, asking  what stopped the American Embassy, with all their sophistication, from cross checking the information provided by her client, adding that the injustices of her client’s deportation to a country he has never lived was compounded by the refusal of the American Embassy to take his finger prints and do a DNA test as the accused person had requested.

Anyanwu urged the court to discharge and acquit her client as there was nothing in the charge to suggest he visited the American Embassy with intent to commit any crime nor did  the charge suggest her client was a threat, telling the court that the embassy officials told his client to produce a third party confirmation  where he did  not know anybody.

She reminded the court that the complainant in the case, the American Embassy, had  never been to court and therefore have shown no interest in the case.

The accused person had while giving evidence, last Wednesday, told the court that he was born on September 3, 1963  in Greenville, South Carolina to Mr Grayson  and Ms Sylvia Atkins, adding that he is not a Nigerian and had only heard of Nigeria in  current affairs where he lived  at Brooklyn, New York City, which he described as a community of African blacks.

“I want to go back home to the United States and get out of prison and get a clean slate because that is the only way that I could be free in the United States. You know in the United States somebody who does not conclude his jail term is a deserter and I don’t want to be one. I keep going to the US Embassy because I am an American and will go nowhere else. They should check my DNA and finger prints and check if I am an American or not. This, they don’t want to do. Imagine that all those deported with me came with their bags and luggage but not me. I want the United States government to look into my case and correct what my problems may be because I am not a Nigerian.” Grayson said.

Wonders, they say, may never cease?