Samuel Ojegele V. The State (1988)

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A. OPUTA, J.S.C.

The facts of this case are miserable, sordid and morbid but they reflect the moral decay of the age in which we live; the age of unbridled acquisitiveness; of get rich quick at all costs and by any means; even at the expense of human suffering and human life. Samuel Idowu Ojegele, the 1st Appellant and Agboola Amos alias Baba Wale, the 2nd Appellant, caught the spirit of the age and conceived an idea to get rich quick. The 5th accused in the trial Court – Amusa Ishola Yesuff – was at hand to help him.

Amusa Yesuff then introduced the 1st Appellant and the 2nd Appellant to a medicine man, Iwaloye Elero, the 3rd Appellant who was reputed to possess the power to prepare a concoction capable of making people rich. Reminiscent of the witches’ concoction in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or Robert Burns’ Tam O’Shanter, the 3rd Appellant prescribed the following ingredients:-

(i) The hunch of a hunch-backed man

(ii) Irun ajija

(iii) mercury and rainbow.

The 1st and 2nd Appellants having procured the required irun ajija elicited the help of one Taliatu Ishola and one Bashiru both at large to help them secure the hunch of a hunch-backed man. Bashiru came in very handy because his “brother” Dauda Ishola Alabi – the deceased – was hunch-backed and he Bashiru was quite prepared to “bring him to be used to prepare the medicine for money”.

The 1st and 2nd Appellants in company of Taliatu Ishola and Bashiru then left Kano for Iwo in search of the deceased. At Iwo Bashiru saw “his brother” the deceased and asked him to discharge his passengers and meet them at the Maiyegun Hotel. The deceased was a taxi driver. From that hotel the deceased drove with his brother in his (the deceased person’s) taxi while the 1st and the 2nd Appellants drove in the 1st Appellant’s vehicle No.KNE.5367 a Peugeot 404 Pick-Up wagon along with Taliatu Ishola. This was in the night of 13/10/81. At a point along the Iwo-Gbogan Road the deceased stopped to ease himself. There he was brutally and mercilessly attacked by the 1st and 2nd Appellants. The 2nd Appellant first gave the deceased “a deep cut near the left eye with a cutlass”.

When his own brother Bashiru joined in the attack the deceased shouted – “HAI Bashiru!” This reminds one of Julius Caesar’s despairing shout Et tu Brute! For Caesar that “was the most unkindest cut of all”. So it must have also been for the deceased to see his own brother strike him with a matchet. The deceased died on the spot. His dismembered body cut up into eight parts was dug out from the premises of the 3rd Appellant with the spine at the back bearing the hunch removed as well as the heart, the spleen, the shoulder blades, the tip of the penis and the knee caps – (see Evidence of P.W.1 Dr. William Olufemi Odesanmi).

The Appellants were arrested, charged with the murder of the deceased and each volunteered Statements to the Police. These Statements were recorded by P.W. 9 Sergeant No. 23584, Jacob Aborowa. The P.W.9 seeing that the Statements were confessional in nature took the Appellants to a Senior Police Officer, A.S.P. Moses Aboliwo called as P.W.12. Before the A.S.P. these Statements were read and interpreted to the Appellants by Sergeant Samuel Ojumu, called as P.W. 13. After that exercise, P.W.12, the Assistant Superintendent of Police, endorsed the Statements and Sergeant Ojumu, P.W.13, signed as Interpreter.

At the hearing, the Appellants alleged that those Statements, EXS K. M, E and F respectively, were extracted from them by torture – in other words – that their Statements were not voluntarily made. As would be expected the learned trial Judge, Babalakin, J. (as he then was), held a mini trial within the main trial designed to probe the voluntariness of the Statements the Appellants made to the Police. At the end of this exercise the trial Judge found that the Statements were made voluntarily by the Appellants and then received them in evidence as exhibits.

In a judgment that was very near perfect, the learned trial Judge painstakingly, meticulously and assiduously considered the entire evidence led on both sides, carefully weighed the probabilities of the case, which probabilities were safe pointers to the shrine of truth. He also considered very seriously the confessional Statements of the Appellants. Although he could have justifiably convicted on the confessions of the Appellants, the learned trial Judge, out of an abundance of caution, looked for corroboration from the evidence of other witnesses and from the surrounding circumstances. He found that the confessions of the Appellants were in the main amply corroborated by the evidence of the prosecution witnesses especially the P.W.1 Dr. Odesanmi, P.W.3, Memudu Oyebanji, P.W.5 Emmanuel Olatigbo. P.W.8, Chief Akinluye Omole and P.W.10, Abimbola Arogundade, the Kano Photographer. The trial Judge after all these then believed the prosecution witnesses, preferred the accounts of the incidents resulting in the death of the deceased as told by the Appellants themselves in their own extra judicial Statements (when the matter was still fresh in their minds) to the afterthought account they gave when they testified in their own defences in Court. He specifically disbelieved the evidence of the Appellants in Court. He then found them guilty of the murder of the deceased and sentenced them to death.

Dissatisfied and aggrieved the 3 Appellants each appealed to the Court of Appeal Ibadan Division. That Court upheld the findings, judgment and sentence of the trial Court and described the Appellants’ appeals “as lacking in substance” and dismissed same.

The Appellants have now appealed to this Court. The only Original Ground worth considering is the only ground filed by Samuel Ojegele the 1st Appellant at p.331 of the record of proceedings:-