COURT OF APPEAL
DATE: 4TH DECEMBER, 1959.
BEFORE: KORSAH C.J., VAN LARE J.A. AND GRANVILLE SHARP J.A.
CASE REFERRED TO
R. v. Podola ([1960] 1 Q.B. 325).
COUNSEL
Swaniker for appellant (Yeboah). The appellant was charged with the unprovoked murder of his mother. It is submitted that on the evidence his insanity was obvious. Glasgow for respondent (Crown) not called on.
JUDGMENT OF GRANVILLE SHARP J. A.
The appellant in this case was convicted before Adumua-Bossman J., sitting with a jury, of the murder of his mother at Asiakwa in the Eastern Region on the 11th January, 1959. On the evidence there could be no doubt that the appellant caused the death of his mother by stabbing her with a knife, after there had been between him and the mother some trivial dispute as to money, as to a missing letter and as to the appellant’s desire to travel to Jasikan, to which his mother would not consent.
The only defence that could be (or was) set up by learned Counsel for the appellant was that he was insane at the time he committed the offence. There was, in our opinion, insufficient evidence to establish this in law. No medical evidence was called and the case for the appellant rested on no more than a suggestion by the appellant that he had been under medical treatment for a considerable time before his return to his mother’s house, which was about a week before he killed her, and that his illness at that time had been a mental illness. He was not supported in this by members of his family who gave evidence for the prosecution. His uncle said that the illness consisted of “pains all over the body”, and although it might be said that this could include pains in the head it cannot be said, upon such a conjecture, that it in any legal sense supported a plea of insanity.
The case for the prosecution was pointedly put by learned Counsel to the appellant in a question as follows:- “You were annoyed because your mother did not provide you with the money you asked for?”
In answer to the appellant, in effect, put the whole essence of his defence. He said “My answer is that it was sickness; because even if my mother had annoyed me, it’s not a cutlass or a knife with
[p.436] of [1959] GLR 434
which I should attack her.” Earlier in his evidence he had said that on the morning in question his whole mind was confused, and that after his mother had said she did not want him to return to Jasikan, and later denied any knowledge of a letter for which he was searching, and in which his wife had said she no longer wished to continue in marriage with him, he remembered no more as to what happened until he was told at Kibi Police Station on the following day.
The suggestion of hysterical amnesia does not provide a defence, however, and cannot be said in law to support a plea of insanity (see the case of R. v. Podola ( [1960] I Q.B. 325)).
Upon a full consideration of the recorded evidence, however, we formed the opinion that the frenzy into which the appellant was thrown by grievances that were undoubtedly of a trivial nature may well have resulted from, and possibly were the aftermath of, some nine months of illness which had rendered him prone to “lose his head” even to the point of attacking his mother. We could not find in all this any defence in law, and we therefore dismissed the appeal. We felt however, that in all the circumstances the facts are so much in mitigation of the offence of murder as to justify our recommending for consideration a reprieve from sentence of death.
