Muritala Akibu V. The State (2016)

LawGlobal-Hub Lead Judgment Report – COURT OF APPEAL

HARUNA SIMON TSAMMANI, J.C.A. (Delivering the Leading Judgment)

This is an appeal against the judgment of the Ogun State High Court, sitting at Ijebu-Ode and delivered by the Hon. Justice O. A. Onafowokan on the 28th day of March, 2014.

Before the said High Court, the Appellant and one other were arraigned on a three counts amended charge alleging the offences of conspiracy to commit and the commission of armed robbery, which are offences contrary to Sections 6(b) and 1(2)(b) of the Robbery and Firearms (Special Provisions) Act, Cap. R.11, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria, 2004.

The Appellant and his co-accused were found guilty on counts 1 and 2 of the Amended Charge and sentenced to twenty-one (21) years each for conspiracy to and the commission of robbery simpliciter. They were however discharged and acquitted on the third (3rd) Court.

A summary of the facts of this case is that, on the 27th day of July, 2010, the Appellant conspired with one other person, who was tried along with him, to and did rob one Bola Otuyelu, in her home at Itanrin Village, Ijebu-ode within the Ijebu-ode Judicial Division of the High Court

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of Ogun State. At, the trial, the said Bola Otuyelu who was victim of the alleged crime, testified to the effect that she and her children were sleeping, at about 2:00a.m in the night of 27/7/2001, when she heard noise from outside their home. That, the intruders entered the house through the kitchen which door they broke down; and that it was the sound of the door that woke her up, she tried to call her brother but could not do so because, the intruders had already closed in on her. According to her (PW1) the intruders scattered the whole house and collected her handset and that of her child.

According to the witness (PW1), the intruders even attempted to rape her when her telephone rang from the bathroom where she had dropped it, so the robbers took the phone, switched it off and left. According to her, it was the Appellant who tried to rape her. That when the robbers came, there was no light in her room as she usually puts out the light before going to bed, but that she could see the Appellant who was not wearing a mask with the aid of the light from her bathroom and the torchlight carried by her attackers.

?At the trial, the prosecution also led

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evidence to show that, the PW2, a member of the Vigilante Group in the area, received a distress call that night of the incident whereof he organized some members of his group to search for the robbers. That, the Appellant and his co-accused were arrested that night and handed over to the police and that upon being searched, the handset phones stolen from the P.W.1 were found on the Appellant and his co-accused. That, the Appellant made a statement to the police which statement was confessional. At the trial, the said statement was admitted in evidence, after a trial-within-trial, as Exhibit ‘B’.

The defence of the Appellant was a complete denial of the charges against him, when he retracted or resiled from his statement made to the police and which is in evidence as Exhibit ‘B’.

?At the hearing, the prosecution called three witnesses who testified as P.W.1, P.W.2 and P.W.3 and also tendered three exhibits which were admitted and marked as Exhibits A, B and C respectively. The Appellant testified in his defence as the D.W.2. At the close of evidence, parties filed and exchanged Written Addresses and in a well-considered judgment delivered on the

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