In Abuja, lawyer Christopher Chidera has challenged the legality of the conviction and life sentence handed to Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) leader Nnamdi Kanu, arguing that the case was built on a series of unlawful steps taken by three different courts.
Chidera’s briefing note, released to the press, states that Kanu was discharged and the charges against him quashed on 13 October 2022. He contends that every subsequent action – from the Court of Appeal to the Supreme Court and finally the Federal High Court – lacked a lawful foundation, describing the process as “one unauthorised act stacked on another until conviction and life imprisonment.”
Central to the lawyer’s case is the distinction that a repealed penal law cannot survive, even if a savings clause keeps a pending case alive. “A savings clause may keep a pending case alive, but it does not revive the repealed statute or identify the written law that created the offence and penalty on the day of conviction,” Chidera said, citing section 36(12) of the Constitution.
He criticised the Court of Appeal, whose judgment by Justice Tsammani (now a Supreme Court Justice) discharged Kanu and quashed the counts, claiming the court had become functus officio. Chidera argued that a “stay,” a device borrowed from civil cases, was used to freeze a criminal discharge without any constitutional or statutory authority, and that no precedent supports such a practice.
Chidera also questioned the Supreme Court’s decision, delivered by Justice Lawal Garba, which could set aside the Court of Appeal’s ruling or order a fresh trial but could not “continue” a trial on charges that had been quashed. He noted that the court had no power to grant jurisdiction that the statute does not confer and that framing charges is the prosecution’s responsibility.
Further, the lawyer took issue with the court’s description of the repealed Terrorism (Prevention) Act as “extant” and “subsisting.” “A repealed penal law is not still in force,” Chidera said, pointing out that the 2022 Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act repealed the earlier law and that its savings provisions can preserve a pending process but not the old statute as the law defining crime and punishment. He argued that sections 97 and 98 of the new Act should have carried the case onto the law in force.
“A lawful criminal judgment requires a living charge, a court with that charge before it, and a written law in force creating both offence and penalty. Without these, a conviction has no legal floor,” Chidera concluded. “Prestige is not a defence, the record is the indictment.”
<small>Source: The Sun Nigeria — read the original story there.</small>
