By Adesina Soyooye
Mrs Uchechi Okwu-Kanu, wife of the convicted Leader of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra, Nnamdi Kanu, slamned the Honourable Justice James Omotosho for sentencing her husband to life sentence.
Justice Omotosho had, on Thursday, November 20, ended a 10-year long trial of Kanu by finding him guilty on all the six-count charge preferred against him by the Federal Government. All the charges bordered mostly on terrorism and four of them carried the death sentence.
However, while sentencing Kanu, Omotosho took refuge in a Bible passage from the Book of St. Mathew, which preaches mercy, and did away with the death sentence, which he said is no longer fashionable, and converted it to life sentence. He also slammed Kanu with a 20 and five-year sentences for the two other charges.
However, an angry and stunned Kanu’s wife, Uchechi, has tackled Justice Omotosho for the sentences slammed on her husband.
In a statement on Thursday, same day her husband was sentenced, Mrs Kanu insisted that a Judge cannot ask a defendant to open a defense on terrorism related-charges without reading out the law under which the person is being tried.
She accused Omotosho of reading the script of a judgement written and handed over to him. Proof?
She said Omotosho “could barely read out some of the words in his own very written judgment.”
Uchechi: “In Nigeria, a Judge cannot ask a defendant to open a defense on terrorism related charges without reading out the written law under which the court is trying that person. Okay, so the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999, as amended, section 36, I mean, I’m sure that is very familiar to everyone now.
“It provides that a person shall not be convicted of a criminal offense unless the the offense is defined and the penalty prescribed as in a written law.
“So what Omotosho has done today (Thursday)is a script, a written script for him to read out. Everyone could hear him. Everyone could see that he was reading a script handed over to him and that he could barely read out some of the words in his own very written judgment. How interesting. How interesting.
“I’ve had to quickly tweet and will post the travesty of justice today regarding how Omotosho ignored the Constitution’s requirement that none can be convicted under an unwritten or unknown offense.
“He forced Mazi Nnamdi Kanu to take a plea under a repealed law, which Mazi Nnamdi Kanu refused. So show me where it is written before I can enter into a defense. And that never happened.
“Omotosho refused, blatantly, flagrantly, to issue written rulings on serious applications. So you could hear him reading. You could hear him counting 1000s of lines of hours of account.
“But then he refused to issue a written ruling which he ought to have done first, but never did. He told Mazi Nnamdi Kanu to put all objections in a final address, then block the final address.
“So if you were Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, you will be as outraged as he was this afternoon.
“You cannot ask me to put my final address, put it down, write it down, and then you block it. So Mazi Nnamdi Kanu has right. It is his right to put a final address down, to write it down. But a Omotosho blocked that and decided to read out those nonsense he called counts.”
Kanu who was absent during the Judgement because the Judge asked that he be walked out of the Court for being unruly, has indicated, through his Special Counsel, Alloy Ejimakor, that he would challenge his conviction at the Court of Appeal.
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