Crime Analyst and Certified Professional Investigator Ransford Nana Addo Jnr has damned Ghana’s criminal justice system as a failed one that has hardly yielded desired results.
Speaking to the press a day after two youngsters were convicted for murder at Kasoa in the Central Region, Ransford Nana Addo says the convicts are paying the price only because they were caught in the act. Had they escaped from their sordid deed, society would be hailing them for whatever benefits their ritual murder would have afforded them.
Nicholas Kini, who was 18 years old at the time he and his then 15-year old friend murdered Ishmael Abdallah, then 10, for rituals to acquire wealth, has been handed a life sentence.
His accomplice who is still a juvenile, will be sentenced by a juvenile court.
Analysing the circumstances of the murder and its outcome, Ransford Nana Addo said he does not think that the Ghanaian society has paid these harrowing crimes the seriousness they deserve.
“Fortunately, it is only these small, small ones that have come to the fore and you hear, but the elephant in the room is that we are all aware that communities are springing up in this country where we have a lot of young people who belong to various groups who have built mansions and have fleets of vehicles and nobody is questioning where they got this money from.
“Our criminal justice system has failed us, because in some jurisdictions what they have used to treat this, is a very, very good law we call ‘unexplained source of wealth’. In our own case, we are still depending on the Criminal Offences Act of 1960, Act 29, where we have positioned ourselves that we need to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the crime has been committed.
“But how will you explain, assuming these boys killed the deceased, fixed him somewhere nobody got to know, the following year he was driving a Range Rover at the age of 19 or 18, he’s built a new shop for his mother, he’s bought a house in a prime area. As a people, are we saying that all the crimes that will be committed, all we want to see is to see people caught in the act before we trigger our intelligence agencies? It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense at all for anybody to say that our laws on explained wealth, we should keep it the way it is…?”
