State To Appeal Against Cocaine Case

The Attorney-General’s (A-G) Office has begun the necessary processes to enable it to appeal against the Accra Circuit Court decision which acquitted and discharged Nana Ama Martins of the charge of possessing cocaine.

The A-G’s Office, according to the State Attorney who prosecuted the matter, had prepared the notice of appeal and was waiting for a copy of the court’s ruling in order to file the documents.

The State Attorney, Mrs Stella Arhin, disclosed this Friday when she took her turn to testify before the committee set up by the Chief Justice to investigate the circumstances under which 1,020 grammes of cocaine exhibit tendered in evidence at the Accra Circuit Court turned into washing soda.

She said after the ruling by the court, “all my superiors became very surprised because we were all confident that we will win the case”.

According to her, the trial judge relied on a Supreme Court authority to bolster his ruling that an objection could be raised at any stage of a trial and even on appeal.

But the chair of the committee, Mrs Justice Agnes Dordzie, indicated that the decision relied on by the trial judge was wrong and asked the State Attorney whether she had read the case, to which she responded in the negative.

The witness said during the trial, so many things happened, such that at a point defence counsel accused her of wrongdoing by accepting bribe, while she also accused counsel of holding a photocopy of the police docket on the matter without having applied for it.

However, she said, the judge reprimanded defence counsel for his choice of language and asked him to apologise to her, which counsel obliged.

The witness said she was also surprised at portions of the judge’s ruling which attempted to castigate her for her role in the trial and she thought the judge was unfair to her.

Narrating how she became associated with the matter, Mrs Arhin said the docket was assigned to her in 2009 when she prepared a charge sheet for the trial, but she realised from the extract that the matter had been taken to Circuit Court One already and when she called the investigator, Lance Corporal Thomas Anyekase, to enquire about the progress of the matter, he told her that he was attending a course.

“When I was not hearing from him, I called again and he said he had not completed the course,” she said, and added that she then proceeded on her maternity leave. On her return when she went to the court one day on a different case, she saw the docket on the Nana Ama Martins case and learnt that it was being handled by DSP Dery and that the accused person had been granted bail by the High Court.

The witness said after being granted bail, the accused person absconded and was later arrested by Interpol and brought back to stand trial, which resumed on August 24, 2011.

During the trial, she realised that the new investigator in the case, Detective Constable Joseph Owusu, had very little to do with the case and, therefore, she called the first investigator, L/Cpl Anyekase, through whom she tendered the police forensic laboratory report on the cocaine and the exhibit before she called the new investigator as a witness.

Mrs Arhin said when the exhibit and its accompanying report were tendered, defence counsel did not object and the exhibit was admitted in a brown envelope which was opened for all to see the whitish substance, before defence counsel started his cross-examination to a point where he stopped to continue on the next day, which was September 28, 2011.

She noted that the exhibit was kept in the custody of the court overnight and returned the next day for defence counsel to continue with his cross-examination and at the tail end of it he requested to have the exhibit retested because he said he did not trust the test conducted by the police.

The witness said she vehemently objected to the exhibit being sent for another test, since the police had already conducted their test, and explained that that was the norm and that when a substance was arrested by the Narcotics Control Board (NACOB), it was sent to the Ghana Standards Board (GSB) for testing. So she did not agree that the substance be sent for another testing.

“We left the drug in the custody of the court and did not take any precaution as to its safekeeping because nobody thought it could be tampered with,” she said, and added that the judge became angry and wondered whether she was questioning the integrity of the court after her objection. The judge eventually ruled in favour of the defence counsel.

The witness explained that her objection was based on the fact that when the exhibit was tendered, defence counsel was present but he did not raise any objection. Also, the police had already prepared a report, while the drug had been left in the custody of the court overnight with the seal broken.

She said when, on occasions, the GSB analyst could not come to court, she decided to ask him what the result of the second test was before going to court, an action which she denied was improper, since the analyst was not her witness but the court’s.

Asked why she did not make an order for the destruction of the substance after it had been tendered, Mrs Arhin said she forgot to do that. Moreover, defence counsel had not finished with his cross-examination and admitted that counsel had hinted that he would have the substance retested because what the investigator had tendered was not cocaine.

The witness further admitted that the exhibit tendered in court on September 27, 2011 was the same exhibit which was brought to court the next day, a sample of which was taken for the retesting, but she could not remember whether the investigator was asked to identify it before the sample was taken for the retesting.

The Deputy Registrar of the Circuit Court, Mr Seidu Yussif, said the sample of the cocaine was taken in the presence of all the interested parties, put in an envelope and sealed, after which the prosecutor, the accused person and the investigator appended their signatures on the envelope before it was embossed with a seal to secure it ahead of the retesting at the GSB.

He said on September 29, 2011 the investigator inspected the envelope and after having satisfied himself with all the security features, proceeded to the GSB where an analyst, Adarkwa Yiadom, inspected the envelope and took it to the laboratory.

Mr Yussif explained that the analyst, after testing the substance, confirmed that it was not cocaine and collected a sample back to the office.

Another witness, Mr Frederick Tetteh Kudjonu, who is the Registrar of the Circuit Court, during cross-examination, said he did not know anything about the case except to say that he was told by Mr Yussif, his deputy, that the court had ordered that the exhibit which was in the custody of the court be sent to the GSB for retesting.

At that point, a member of the committee, Mr Justice Abdullai Iddrisu, sought to find out from him whether the court did not have an exhibit room, to which he responded in the negative, saying that usually exhibits of those nature were kept in the judge’s chamber.

The committee is chaired by Mrs Justice Dordzie, a Justice of the Court of Appeal, and has Mr Justice Iddrisu, a Justice of the High Court, and Mr John Bannerman, the Chief Registrar General, as members, with Nii Boye Quartey, a Deputy Human Resource Director, as Secretary.

Its terms of reference are to establish the role played by the trial judge and other court officials, including the registrar and the court clerk, in the matter and other matters related thereto.