Judge Blasts Prosecutors

By Stephen Kwabena Effah
Friday, 05 September 2008

A Circuit Court judge hearing narcotics and armed robbery cases at the Cocoa Affairs Court in Accra, yesterday lashed out at the prosecution team for their lackadaisical attitude towards some of the cases being tried at the court.

The judge, Iddrisu Mahamadu, has consistently complained about the prosecution’s lateness, failure to bring suspects to or show up in court, poor investigation and laxity in pursuing cases assigned them, among others.

At the court’s sitting yesterday, the judge did not mince words in criticising a police investigator for showing up in court about an hour after a case he is handling had been called and adjourned.

“Are you not sensitive to all the criticisms flying around?” he asked the investigator, Edward Asante, and described the attitudes of some members of the prosecution as a shame.

What angered him most was when he detected that even the plea of the accused person in the case being handled by the investigator had not been taken five months after his arrest.

Mr. Mahamadu was further infuriated by the fact that the prosecution had not been able to produce to the court a report on the substances suspected to be cocaine expelled by the accused, Michael Ntiamoah, upon which he was arrested in April.

“It is barely five months and it is nobody’s business. What kind of country is this? It’s a shame and I’m very, very disappointed. If we keep this attitude, then let’s forget it,” he said.

He wondered why the investigator has not expedited action to the extent that no plea of the accused was taken five months after his arrest.

“His plea has not been taken…nothing has been done! And for months, everybody is busy pretending to be what?” he questioned, noting that some of them are so busy that they cannot handle the cases assigned them.

“Do we always have to wait for the laboratory report of the substances before the cases could be heard”, “he asked, noting “the accused’s freedom is taken away”.


Mr Mahamadu said the prevailing situation does not augur well for administration of justice and stressed that its continuity would compel him to compile a list of those prosecution members for the appropriate authorities for action to be taken against them.