After spending 19 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, Yaw Appiah, has been acquitted and discharged by the Court of Appeal.
He had been sentenced to prison for 45 years by a High Court in Accra in June 2011, after having spent five years in custody since his arrest in 2006 for a robbery he did not commit.
Neither the complainant in the case had identified Yaw Appiah as one of the persons who robbed him and his family, nor did any of the prosecution witnesses name him as one of the robbers.
Yet, the trial court convicted and sentenced him to 45 years imprisonment in hard labour based on the ‘confession’ of one of the robbers who had claimed that Appiah was part of the gang when they committed the robbery.
In spite of the inconsistencies in the evidence led against him at trial, and the trial judge’s own false claim that Appiah had pleaded guilty to the charges (yet he went through a full trial), the High Court found him guilty of the two counts of conspiracy to commit robbery and a substantive charge of robbery and sentenced him to 45 years imprisonment.
Having spent 17 years in prison, a lawyer finally decided to take Yaw Appiah’s case on appeal based on a conviction he was sentenced to prison for a crime he did not commit.
The Court of Appeal granted his lawyer leave to file the appeal out of time following an application to the appellate court.
The appeal, which was finally filed, challenged the trial, conviction and subsequent sentencing of Yaw Appiah.
The appeal argued that the trial judge erred when he failed to consider the defence of Yaw Appiah at the trial, he failed to take into account the period spent in custody prior to his sentencing, and that the judgement is unreasonable and cannot be supported having regard to the evidence on record.
Even the prosecution, in its affidavit, admit that the evidence on record was not sufficient to have merited a conviction of Yaw Appiah, although it claimed that the convict’s cautioned investigative statement was inconsistent with the evidence he led during the trial
Appeal
The Court of Appeal, in its judgement, held that anything at all said by any of the co-accused persons against appellant as long as appellant did not admit of the truth of that statement, was clearly not binding on appellant and no reasonable inference could have been made.
The appellate court said the evidence on record had not met the threshold of reasonable doubt to have merited conviction of the appellant.
“We find that there was no direct evidence that connected the appellant with the crime, and there was also no circumstantial evidence that linked the appellant to the crime for which he was convicted,” Justices Gbiel S. Suurbaareh, Eric Kyei Baffour and Samuel Obeng-Diawuo found.
The Court of Appeal said the trial judge completely misapprehended the evidence that was led by prosecution, and if attention had been paid to the evidence led, appellant would not have been called to open his defence as prosecution failed to establish a prima facie case against him.
“It is a tragedy that this appellant had been in custody since 2006 for a crime which there was no evidence to link him, and only appealed after seventeen years in custody. It is better late than never and we proceed to do the needful by setting aside the conviction as being erroneous. The judgement of the court below is reversed. The conviction and sentence are set aside. The appeal succeeds,” the Court of Appeal added.
BY Gibril Abdul Razak