CHIEF (HON.) NKWO NNABUCHI & ORS V. I.G.P. & ORS (2025) 8 NWLR (PT. 1993) 495 ON MEANING OF OBITER DICTUM An obiter is a Judge’s passing remarks which have…
Read More
CHIEF (HON.) NKWO NNABUCHI & ORS V. I.G.P. & ORS (2025) 8 NWLR (PT. 1993) 495 ON WHO IS AN AGGRIEVED PERSON An aggrieved person is a party who has…
There is a difference between when an accused person would recant the voluntariness of his confessional statement, on the ground of either torture, duress or promise from a person in position of authority, and where the accused deny making any confessional statement at all. In the former scenario, the court is duty bound to conduct a trial-within-trial to ascertain the voluntariness of the statement, but in the latter case the court can admit the statement and determine the weight attachable to it after subjecting it to the test to determine its veracity.
In order to rely on the defence of self-defence, an accused person has to show by evidence that his life was so much endangered by the act of the deceased that the only means of escape from imminent death was to kill the deceased. The defence is not available to an accused person if his defensive measures to protect himself are out of proportion with the danger which he faced. Put in another way, the defence of self-defence is a child of necessity.
A re-trial order should not be used as a tool to assist the prosecution that has failed to prove its case. In the instant case, having found that after a full-scale trial the respondent was unable to prove its case against the appellant, the decision of the Court of Appeal ordering a retrial would have resulted in subjecting the appellant to another harrowing experience of a second criminal trial. Furthermore, the circumstances of the case would render it oppressive to try the appellant a second time and allow the respondent an opportunity to fine-tune its case and get a ‘second bite at the cherry’.
In the offence of rape, penetration is the most vital and essential ingredient. The degree of penetration or its duration is immaterial. In this case, PW2 gave unchallenged evidence of penetration, and her evidence was corroborated by the evidence of PW1 and PW3. Therefore, the findings of the Court of Appeal that there was penetration and that the evidence of the prosecutrix was corroborated are impregnable. [Natasha v. State (2017) 18 NWLR (Pt. 1396) 38 referred to.] (Pp. 529, paras. E-H; 532, paras. A-B).
By virtue of sections 15(4) and 17(2) of the ACJA, a duty is imposed on public functionaries (police officers and other officers of any law enforcement agency established by an Act of the National Assembly and this includes the EFCC) to record electronically on retrievable video compact disc or such other audio visual means, the confessional statements of a suspect and to take statements of suspects in the present of the person(s) set out in section 17(2).
Generally, provocation has been described to mean some act or series of acts done by the deceased to the accused which would cause in a reasonable man and did cause in the accused a sudden and temporary loss of self-control, rendering the accused so subject to passion as to make him or her for the moment not master of his mind.
At the stage of a ruling on a submission of a no case to answer, otherwise known as a no-case submission, which is made by an accused person charged with crime at the close of the evidence adduced by the prosecution, the court is not called upon to embark on a detailed assessment, evaluation and belief or disbelief of the evidence placed before it with a view to making a finding of guilt or not guilty of the accused person.
To succeed in convicting an offender of murder, the prosecution is required to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the act of the accused which resulted in the death of the deceased fell within the circumstances set forth under section 316 of the Criminal Code which defines the offence of murder. They are: