Criminal Law Blog Ghana

Repeat applications are recognized and permitted in criminal procedure and are more common with bail applications. What is a repeat application and when can one file same? Adjei, JA eloquently set out the basis for repeat applications in t he Court of Appeal case of Paul Larbie & 3 Others v The Republic [2020] Crim.LR 532 ( click here for full case ). What it is: A repeat application is an application filed in an appellate court after the same application has been refused by a court below unless a statute provides otherwise. Thus, an applicant whose application has been refused by a lower court can either repeat the application at the court above or appeal against the ruling refusing his application. For instance, a bail application filed at a trial Circuit Court, when refused, can be repeated at the High Court. (See rule 20(2) of C.I. 16 and rules 9(8) and 28 of C.I. 19 for examples of repeat applications at the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal). When to file a repeat application...

Every criminal law practitioner, whether prosecuting or defending, may have heard this statement: “Appeals are filed at the registry of the court below”. This may be true for criminal appeals to the Court of Appeal [1] and the Supreme Court. [2] But is this the case for substantive criminal appeals from the Circuit and District Courts to the High Court?  Sometime in May 2022, I was served with an application for bail pending appeal to be determined by the High Court. The application was premised on a Petition of Appeal  (often indicated as a Notice of Appeal) against a sentence imposed by the Circuit Court. The Petition of Appeal was filed at the Circuit Court Registry instead of the High Court Registry and this was brought to the court’s attention. Arguments were taken to determine the validity of the Petition of Appeal having regard to the procedural requirements for filing such petitions. This was necessary because the Supreme Court has held that the rules of court for...

There have been several bail applications I have dealt with where averments in the supporting affidavit have been centered on the ill health of the accused person or convict. Some have gone further to attach medical reports proving the alleged condition. These applications are mostly granted although the reasons given in the rulings are not emphatic that the basis of the grant of bail is the ill health of the applicant.  It is therefore necessary that we answer the question posed in the title: is ill health a ground for the grant of bail. This article  will also look at the circumstances under which ill health will be considered. Let me state from the onset, that detention is not an avenue for the rights of a detainee to be trampled on, especially their rights to life and healthcare. Hence, medical care is offered to persons in police and prison custody at the expense of the state.  Before 2004, the general rule was that ill health was not a ground for the grant of b...

Criminal law is a specific practice area with its own procedure and governing laws. As case law is one of the major sources of criminal law, finding cases to help you in your practice is a core issue that requires its own dedicated write up. As a criminal law practitioner, writer and co-editor of a law report specific to this practice area, I spend most of my time reading criminal cases. Here is a list of all the places I find criminal law cases: 1. Law Reports: Law reports are specifically dedicated to curating relevant and groundbreaking cases that significantly add to our criminal jurisprudence, by either emphatically restating, changing, adding to or setting aside an existing legal position. Note that a law report differs from a case database, for whereas a database is a collection of court cases with nothing more to it, a law report has other elements such as the headnotes or summary, the holdings and the list of cases cited. I use three major printed law reports: a. The Criminal ...

The laws regulating criminal procedure in Ghana are many. Indeed, the 1992 Constitution is the first source of criminal law. It contains provisions on fundamental human rights and the fair trial rules. The constitution also contains some offences, an example being the offence of high treason in article 3 (3). The primary enactment that codifies offences in Ghana is the Criminal Offences Act, 1960 (Act 29). In addition to Act 29, there are specialised enactments targeted at specific kinds of offences. These include the Cybesecurity Act, 2020 (Act 1038), the Domestic Violence Act, 2007 (Act 732), the Office of the Special Prosecutor Act, 2017 (Act 959) and the Anti-Money Laundering Act, 2020 (Act 1044). And then there are enactments passed for other reasons but have offence creating sections that criminalise certain acts or omissions. An example is the Minerals and Mining Act, 2003 (Act 703) as amended, which regulates the mining industry, acquisition of mining licenses etc. The Act crim...