The Court of Appeal has acquitted and released a man who spent 19 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.
In June 2011, Yaw Appiah was sentenced to 45 years imprisonment by a High Court in Accra for robbery.
Before his sentencing, he had already spent five years in detention since his arrest in 2006 at the age of 29.
Court documents suggest that he was convicted based on the ‘confession’ of one of the arrested robbers who had claimed that Appiah was part of the gang.
However, neither the complainant in the case had identified Yaw Appiah as one of the persons who robbed him and his family, nor did any of the prosecution witnesses name him as one of the robbers.
Despite the inconsistencies in the evidence against him at trial, the High Court found him guilty of two counts of conspiracy to commit robbery and a substantive charge of robbery.
Luck finally smiled at Yaw Appiah when a lawyer took interest in his case after 17 years behind bars.
The lawyer filed an appeal to challenge his trial, conviction and subsequent sentencing.
The appeal argued that the trial judge failed to consider the defence of Yaw Appiah at the trial, and he failed to take into account the period spent in custody before his sentencing.
In its judgement, the Court of Appeal ruled that anything said by any of the co-accused persons against the appellant, as long as the appellant did not admit the truth of that statement, was clearly not binding on the appellant, and no reasonable inference could have been made.
The court added that the evidence on record had not met the threshold of reasonable doubt to have merited the conviction of the appellant.
“We find that there was no direct evidence that connected the appellant with the crime, and there was also no circumstantial evidence that linked the appellant to the crime for which he was convicted.
“It is a tragedy that this appellant had been in custody since 2006 for a crime which there was no evidence to link him, and only appealed after seventeen years in custody. It is better late than never and we proceed to do the needful by setting aside the conviction as being erroneous. The judgement of the court below is reversed. The conviction and sentence are set aside. The appeal succeeds,” Justices Gbiel S. Suurbaareh, Eric Kyei Baffour and Samuel Obeng-Diawuo ruled.
