Give the LACC Its Day in Court

A prosecutor who asks three times for a trial date and never gets one is not the problem with Liberia’s fight against corruption. A docket that lets that happen is.

THERE IS A VERSION of this newspaper’s argument that would be easy to dismiss: that Liberia’s courts are conspiring to protect the powerful from the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission. We are not making that argument, and the record, as best we can tell, does not support it. What the record does support is narrower and, in some ways, more troubling: that it no longer seems to matter whether the LACC does everything right. The outcome is the same either way.

CONSIDER THE CASE this paper detailed this week out of Margibi County. Prosecutors did not sit on their hands. They asked, in writing, for a trial date in May 2026. They asked again two weeks later. When the case was reassigned to a new judge, they asked a third time, in August. Three requests, three separate points on the calendar, and still no trial — not because a witness failed to appear, not because evidence was incomplete, but because the docket never made room. Now the defense wants the case thrown out entirely, under a law written to punish exactly the kind of foot-dragging that, in this instance, the paper trail shows the prosecution did not do.

A JUSTICE SYSTEM THAT CANNOT tell the difference between a prosecutor who asked and a prosecutor who didn’t is not neutral. It is broken in a way that happens to favor whoever is charged.

THIS IS NOT A ONE-OFF. Corruption cases against former NOCAL chief Rustolyn Suacoco Dennis and former Bureau of State Enterprises head Arthur Massaquoi both went the same way — dismissed after sitting for terms at a time while the court’s attention went elsewhere. Add the Margibi case, and what looked like an unfortunate pattern starts to look like a design flaw. Liberia’s Criminal Procedure Law gives defendants a real and necessary protection: if the state doesn’t bring you to trial by the next court term, absent good cause, the case gets dismissed. That protection exists so people are not left to rot under an accusation indefinitely. It was never meant to be a technicality that rewards a court’s own scheduling failures at the expense of the public’s interest in seeing corruption prosecuted.

THE COST NOBODY IS COUNTING

EVERY DISMISSED CORRUPTION case is not a wash. It is a loss. Behind every indictment the LACC secures are months of forensic accounting, subpoenaed bank records, witness interviews and legal drafting, performed by an agency that does not have unlimited money or unlimited staff. When a case dies for lack of a docket slot, the state does not get that investment back for free. It either lets a serious corruption case disappear for good, or it asks an already-stretched commission to redo the work from scratch, against the same clock, in the same courts. Neither outcome serves the public that pays for the LACC’s work and is told, case after case, to wait for the accountability it was promised.

THERE IS ALSO A COST that will not show up in any LACC annual report: what the public concludes when it watches indictment after indictment vanish before a single witness is sworn in. Liberians do not need to believe in a conspiracy to lose faith that corruption prosecutions go anywhere. They only need to keep seeing this outcome. A court system does not have to intend to protect the well-connected for it to end up doing exactly that, term after term, simply by failing to prioritize.

WHAT THE COURTS OWE THE PROCESS

NOBODY IS ASKING judges to rubber-stamp the LACC or fast-track cases in a way that tramples a defendant’s rights. Due process cuts both ways, and it is not this paper’s place to prejudge any individual’s guilt, including in the Margibi case. But due process for the accused cannot be the only interest a court weighs when a docket fills up. The public has an interest in these cases too, and prosecutors who do their part — who file, who write, who ask, on the record, for a hearing — deserve a system that credits that effort rather than one that quietly erases it.

THAT MEANS LIBERIA’S circuit courts need an honest accounting of how corruption cases are prioritized against everything else competing for courtroom time, and it means the judiciary, the Ministry of Justice and the Legislature need to treat docket congestion as the structural crisis it has become rather than an excuse that arrives after the fact, case by case, dismissal by dismissal. A dedicated calendar for LACC prosecutions, firmer rules for how “good cause” gets weighed when the delay traces back to the court rather than the state, and basic transparency about why cases sit for terms at a time would cost far less than what Liberia is currently losing every time one of these cases dies untried.

THE LACC CANNOT do its job if the courts will not give its cases a trial date. That is not a defense of any defendant or any prosecutor. It is a minimum condition for an anti-corruption fight that Liberians have been promised for years and are still, mostly, waiting to see delivered. The courts do not have to decide anyone’s guilt to fix this. They only must decide that a case is worth trying.