Compensation for wrongful imprisonment must reflect the value of liberty, the trauma of incarceration and the opportunities destroyed by a miscarriage of justice.
The Supreme Court’s reported award of GH¢500,000 to Abu Shaibu for 24 years of wrongful imprisonment raises a fundamental question about the value Ghana places on personal liberty.
Similarly, Yaw Appiah reportedly received GH¢800,000 after spending 19 years in prison for a wrongful conviction.
These sums are deeply troubling, not merely because they appear modest when compared with awards in other jurisdictions, but because they compel us to ask whether Ghana’s approach adequately recognises the immeasurable cost of taking away a person’s freedom unlawfully.
At the heart of this debate lies the principle associated with the “Dodzie Sabbah” case, which has informed the assessment of compensation for wrongful imprisonment.
Whatever its original justification, it is time to reconsider whether the approach provides an adequate framework for vindicating the constitutional guarantee of personal liberty.
Article 14 of the 1992 Constitution protects personal liberty, while Article 14(7) specifically provides for compensation where a person is unlawfully arrested, restricted or detained.
Article 14(5) also requires compensation for a person arrested or detained who is not tried within a reasonable time or is released.
These provisions are not decorative promises.
They reflect the constitutional importance of freedom and the obligation of the state to provide an effective remedy when that freedom is unlawfully taken away.
The question is whether the present approach to compensation gives these guarantees their full meaning.
Consider what it means to lose 24 years of one's life behind prison walls for a crime one did not commit.
A person loses not simply years, but the freedom to choose where to live, whom to love, how to earn a living and what kind of future to build.
Family relationships deteriorate, children grow up without parental care, parents die, friendships disappear, and careers that might have flourished are permanently interrupted.
No amount of money can restore those years.
But that is precisely why compensation must be substantial enough to acknowledge the gravity of the wrong.
An award of GH¢500,000 for 24 years of imprisonment works out at approximately GH¢20,833 per year, or about GH¢57 per day.
Although compensation cannot sensibly be reduced to a daily wage, this calculation exposes the inadequacy of treating such an award as a meaningful response to the destruction of a person's liberty and life prospects.
The danger is that compensation becomes an exercise in administrative arithmetic rather than a genuine recognition of constitutional injury.
A remedy that substantially undervalues the loss risks weakening the very right it is intended to protect.
Lessons from other jurisdictions
Other legal systems demonstrate that wrongful imprisonment is not an ordinary financial loss.
In England and Wales, compensation arrangements for miscarriages of justice have included a statutory cap of £1 million for cases involving imprisonment of more than ten years, subject to the applicable legal framework.
The precise limits and eligibility rules must be distinguished from awards made in individual civil claims, but the underlying lesson remains important: prolonged wrongful imprisonment warrants serious financial recognition.
Ghana need not mechanically import British figures.
Our economic circumstances, public finances and legal institutions differ.
Nevertheless, the value of constitutional liberty cannot be measured solely by the relative purchasing power of the cedi and the pound.
A person's freedom is fundamental whether that person lives in Accra, London or a rural Ghanaian community.
The proper lesson is that compensation must be guided by the nature and duration of the injustice, the suffering endured and the damage done to the person's life.
Comparative jurisdictions can help Ghana develop a more principled and humane framework.
The argument that generous compensation would unduly burden the public purse is equally unconvincing when used to justify awards that fail to reflect the injury suffered.
The public purse belongs to the public, including the innocent citizen whose liberty the state has unlawfully taken away.
Why should that citizen bear the financial consequences of a miscarriage of justice committed through the institutions established to protect society?
Compensation is not a windfall. It is a constitutional remedy.
Indeed, meaningful awards can reinforce the imperative for better investigations, more reliable prosecutions and fairer trials.
The objective should not be to bankrupt the state, but neither should fiscal restraint become an excuse for undervaluing fundamental rights.
More importantly, compensation must account for the psychological and emotional consequences of incarceration.
Spending decades on death row, as Abu Shaibu did, entails a particular form of suffering: the constant possibility of execution, uncertainty about the future and the destruction of hope.
No calculation based principally on the duration of imprisonment can adequately capture this trauma without a serious assessment of its human consequences.
The writer is a lawyer.
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