President has no power to pardon Montie trio — Kumado
A lecturer at the Law Faculty of the University of Ghana, Legon, Professor Kofi Kumado, has said that President John Dramani Mahama does not have power under the Constitution to grant pardon to two radio panellists and a programme host who were convicted for scandalising the Supreme Court.
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“I have read about a presidential pardon for those lucky journalists. Well, I have gone through our national Constitution and I do not see where it is provided for with respect to the kind of threat for which they were convicted on their own pleas. I am not worried because the President is my friend and I know he is very intelligent. He will never pretend to a power he does not have,” he said.
Hypocrites?
Reacting to an article published in the Daily Graphic on August 2, 2016, headlined, “Are Ghanaians such hypocrites?”, Professor Kumado said, “Only some Ghanaians act as hypocrites sometimes” and commended the writer of the article, Mr Andrew Kaminta, “for calling a spade a spade. And I do so applaud. Thank you for the space, Mr Editor”.
What the law says
Recalling his days as a Law student, he stated: “I was taught in the Law Faculty at Legon that the punishment for inchoate offences is the same as for the substantive offences. Thus, if you kill a person, the punishment is death; if you threaten to kill a person, the punishment on conviction for the threat is also death. The same will apply to a threat to kill a judge.
“So I think those journalists got off lightly. But if you threaten to kill a judge while he or she is presiding over a case, the threat goes beyond the judge. It is a threat to the institution; it is a threat against one of the pillars of the rule of law. Thus it is a threat against society as a whole. It goes beyond the normal criminal offence.”
“In any event, I am surprised to read or hear that some of the people who cry daily that our Constitution should be amended because it gives the President too much power are now clamouring for the President to exercise a power he does not have, either under the Constitution or any other law of the land,” Prof Kumado added.
The sentence
The two panellists, Alistair Tairo Nelson and Godwin Ako Gunn, and the host, Salifu Maase, alias Mugabe, were on Wednesday, July 27, 2016, sentenced to four months’ imprisonment each for scandalising the court.
They were also ordered to pay GH¢10,000 each or in default serve an additional one month in prison.
The two panellists, spurred on by Maase, threatened the lives of judges of the superior court, especially those who had heard the case on the credibility of the country’s electoral roll filed by Abu Ramadan and Evans Nimako against the Electoral Commission (EC).
The trio, together with the directors of Network Broadcasting Company Limited (NBCL), operators of Montie FM, the radio station where the comments were made, and ZeZe Media, owners of the station’s frequency, were, on July 18, 2016, convicted for contempt of the apex court.
They were found guilty of scandalising the court, defying and lowering the authority of the court and bringing the name of the court into disrepute.
The court, however, did not sentence the trio for the threat of harm and death that they made against the judges, explaining that that constituted another matter for another branch of government to take action.