Frank Caprio, the American judge and public servant, has passed to the great beyond. He was known as the “nicest judge in the world” for the compassion which he displayed in his courtroom. This earned him a celebrity status on social media where millions of people across the world subscribed to his programme, Caught in Providence.
In that programme, Judge Caprio displayed an unusual level of compassion, empathy and humour that drew millions of viewers to the administration of justice on the media. By the time of his death on August 20, 2025, he left behind a deep understanding of a personality that rose from rag to fame, and who transformed what the courtroom represents in a polity, and how public service can be a joy. The fact of his digital presence on social media implies that the insights from his public life can be drawn by everyone from across the world, everyone who had stayed glued to his YouTube channel to draw inspiration from someone who purposely served the American public.
Frank Caprio rose through a very humble beginning, and stretched his determination to pass through law school while working the street to make ends meet without losing sight of where he was headed. It is as if working his way through being a dishwasher, school teacher and a shoe shiner impressed on the young Caprio the template of compassion and the determination to engage the public on a different level.
And he had the moral backing and significant presence of parents who taught him values about humanity and how to be humane in relating with others. Aristotle insists that the family is the basis of building a viable community; it is the space where an individual emerges and is nurtured and trained to become a member of the society.
A good home would then seem to make a good community and society. The Yoruba also say, ilé la ti ń k’ẹ̀sọ́ r’òde (charity begins at home). I can readily relate with the impact that a firm and compassionate family can have on the social maturity of a person. I was trained by parents who infused their training manual with cultural and spiritual insights and wisdom about living a good life while serving others.
Frank Caprio carried his humane perspective into public life. He was the public servant par excellence. He served the American public all his life, even in those instances when he failed to achieve his dream of becoming, say, the Attorney General of Rhode Island. When he finally settled on being a judge at the Providence Municipal Court, he made up his mind to reform the administration of justice, and to do so while the whole world is watching and following him through the judicial process. In all respect, this was a bold and courageous move for two significant reasons.
The first is that justice and its administration are complex things. And they are made even more complex by their relationship with the ideological politics that is at play within any polity. The democratic system of government allows for the separation of powers which requires that the executive, legislature and judiciary must be separated in order to enable checks and balances.
However, we know that in practice, this is often a sham. The government is often interested in the kind of judgment that the court passes, and even more so in how the court should pass such judgments. The second reason for Caprio’s courage with his mediatised programme is that he signaled himself into the public consciousness as a public servant without a secret.
Judge Frank Caprio was critically situated as a public servant in the justice department. And this is because justice is key to the understanding of the political health of a state. Wole Soyinka captures the essence of the role of justice. According to him, justice is the first condition of humanity. The implication of this, for any political regime, is that the idea of justice indicates the imperative of fair treatment that is devoid of racial, income, gender, ethnic biases.
In other words, a stable political community is founded on the capacity of that community to achieve the fair treatment of all; the framework that allows benefits and burdens to be shared according to some fairness principle. For Judge Caprio, justice cannot be blind of the personal and often constricting circumstances of those who are brought into his courtroom. The idea of social justice demand more than Lady Justice dishing out brute judgments behind a veil. He dispensed justice with a firm belief in the inherent goodness of people.
In Judge Frank Caprio’s courtroom, the natural law philosophy trumps the positive law. Natural law encodes a belief in the possibility of moral virtues inherent in human nature. Positive law, on the other hand, dispenses with the possibility of morality in the dispensation of justice. It is that warmth, compassion and empathy that exemplifies Judge Caprio as the very embodiment of social justice.
In a world racked by inequalities and injustices, what could be more elevating than a judge who tempered justice and judgment with humanness, and fairness which comes wrapped with empathy and even humor.
In a case where a motorist was caught running the traffic light, Judge Caprio dismissed the ticket on the condition that the student must finish college. The judge dismissed a case against a man who just had brain surgery, and in that case, he was more concerned about the health of the recovering man. In many of these cases, judgments were dispensed with humanness and kindness and all-round laughter in the courtroom.
Judge Caprio saw people in his courtroom rather than just cases with numbers and statistics. He gave presence to Abraham Lincoln’s observation: “I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.”
There is no point, in other words, to damage the humanity or the future of a person based on one infraction. It would seem that Judge Caprio was always leveraging on the spirit, rather than the form and letter, of the law. And so, it was that Judge Frank Caprio wrote his own epitaph of immortality while he was still alive; he left an indelible memory on the hearts not just of those whose cases were dispensed with kindness and humaneness, but also millions who subscribed to his channel and followed his career as a good judge.
However, there is more that Judge Caprio holds for a country like Nigeria that is assailed by anomie of terrible proportions at almost every level of governance and of public service. By his very status, Judge Caprio challenges the very understanding of who a judge or a public servant should be. Or more significantly, his person, personality and active public life provide another opportunity to signal the significance of the question: what does it mean to be a public servant in a postcolonial context like Nigeria?
Part of the fundamental predicament of the Nigerian state is her inability to provide the mechanism that enables service delivery to Nigerians as part of the government’s dividends of democratic governance. And this failure is grounded on not just the dysfunctional state of the public services, but also largely on the bad image of the public servants and officials who are the very embodiment of what government looks like. To ask the question of who a public or civil servant is, is therefore to get the very heart of the essence of the institutional reform of the public service in Nigeria. It is to unravel what makes the public service a service.
All over the world, the public servant is the person the public sees. She is the person that interfaces the state and the citizens. She is the embodiment of the government’s social contract with the people. The citizens do not see the abstract “state”; they see only the concrete civil servants that manage security, law enforcement, electricity, water, education, highway, healthcare, and other infrastructures on behalf of the government. The citizens saw Judge Frank Caprio. They see the Nigerian policeman on countless roadblocks. Or the Nigerian custom officials at the Seme Border. Or the medical personnel who is more religious than humane. Or the high court judge who is more materialistic than justice demands.
Public service is denoted essentially by a sense of public spiritedness. This simply means that anyone coming into the public service must be aware that it is more than a job or a means of earning a living. It is a spiritual calling.
The best analogy is to draw on the calling of the Levites in the Bible. When God called the Levites, it was a call that specifically demanded that they be separated from every other endeavour. And to forego any claim to whatsoever inheritances the other tribes of Israel were entitled to. It was a call to serve God. The public service is a vocation that calls on any aspirant to public office to serve the public.
Serve the public. Service is a mode of selflessness. It asks the public servant to draw spiritual fulfilment from the dedication and commitment to rendering service to others. The public spirit that pushes the public servant ensures that she is not so preoccupied with the technical details of his/her responsibilities as to miss the human concerns and circumstances of those the service is rendered to. More than everything else, however, public spiritedness demands—as a fundamental imperative—that the public servants must embrace the virtue of deferred gratification in the place of primitive accumulation. You do not serve the public to become obscenely wealthy.
Indeed, public spiritedness insists that the public servant and officials must be held within a framework of personal and public accountability that requires that the official must be held responsible for her duties to the public.
Public spiritedness demands more. It relentlessly pushes the public servant to reflect a professional competence that enables an effective and efficient service to the public. Professionalism in service enables the public servant to perform her duties with efficient optimality. It is this set of professional competences and skills that enable the pubic servant to manage scarce resources and achieve an equitable redistribution in ways that connotes fairness.
Professionalism demands a code of ethical conduct—accountability, public spirit, responsibility, probity, transparency, neutrality, etc.—that defines who the public servant is and the limit of what she can do. This is the lesson that Judge Frank Caprio leaves behind as a significant part of his legacy to the world. He has become an exemplar, in the league of Jesus Christ, Muhammed, Mother Theresa, Queen Amina, Gautama Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Stella Adadevoh, and many others who took the public seriously enough to give their all, even their lives.
The institutional reform of the civil service system in Nigeria is founded on the political will to articulate an administrative vision that enables us to build a new generation of public managers with right spirit, sensibility, ethical code, technical know-how and patriotic zeal to lead the transformation of a system that is meant to make the lives of Nigerians worth living. We need the like of Judge Frank Caprio to restore the soul of public administration as the basis for bringing democratic governance alive.
Credit:The Guardian