If indeed his signature had been forged, the natural and instinctive reaction of any reasonable person, upon being confronted with such a fabrication, would be one of immediate and unconditional repudiation. The natural impulse to protect one’s name and integrity is innate and fundamental, just as a cry of distress is a call to rescue, the discovery of a forgery or an attempt of same, is a summons to denial.
So, too, the appellant’s case, while not denying the receipt of the moneys from the complainant, was that the transaction was a loan, and appellant produced a copy of an acknowledgment given by him to the complainant, in support of his defence. The Magistrate in rejecting the defendant’s case laid some stress on this acknowledgment, and stated as follows: “I am not satisfied with the explanation given by the accused as to how he came by the money. Accused is literate, yet he did not prepare the Exhibit “1” (i.e. the acknowledgment) himself. Why he should go to a letter-writer to have a receipt prepared, I fail to see. Furthermore he made no attempt to repay money. I do not believe him.” We, on the other hand, can easily appreciate why a literate person would rather not prepare such an acknowledgement himself for an illiterate person, for fear that it might be suggested that he took advantage of his illiterate debtor’s ignorance of the nature of the document. If made by a third party, a licensed letter-writer as in this case, more weight could and should be attached to the genuineness of an acknowledgement. We think, therefore, that the Magistrate erred in his inference, and that such a faulty inference must have coloured his decision.
Gazette notice as prima facie proof of a fact of a public nature
We referred to Order 37, rule 55 of the Supreme [High] Court (Civil Procedure) Rules which provides that: “All Proclamations . . . nominations, appointments, and other official communications of the Government, appearing in any such Gazette, may be proved by the production of such Gazette and shall be prima facie proof of any fact of a public nature which they were intended to notify” and being satisfied that the Gazette Notice to which our attention was called by counsel for the plaintiff-appellant was only prima facie proof of the fact notified, gave leave to counsel for the defendant-respondent to lead such evidence as was available to him towards rebutting the fact stated in the Gazette Notice.
What stands out in this case is that the 1defendant used suspicion plus supposition plus speculation to arrive at the answer it started out with, to mount his defence. However, suspicions added to supposition and speculation do not amount to proof on the part of one on whom the burden of proof rests as to the existence of any material fact.
In my respectful opinion, the process of drawing inferences from evidence is not the same as speculating, even where the circumstances permit an educated guess. In my view, it is also important to point out that supposition or conjecture is no substitute for evidence and cannot be relied upon as the basis for a reasonably drawn inference in this case. The assumed facts for the inference must be taken from the primary facts for a proper and reasonably drawn inference. A reasonably drawn inference requires an evidentiary foundation, which in this case is lacking because no evidence was led to show that the 1st Appellant had no authority to act.
Inference of guilt from false or conflicting explanations
The main question is whether any other inference consistent with the innocence of the accused, and not by itself improbable, can be drawn from the false or conflicting explanation, provided the rest of the evidence does not negative this inference.
Circumstantial evidence is evidence of facts from which, taken with all the other evidence, a reasonable inference is a fact directly in issue. It works by cumulatively, in geometrical progression, eliminating other possibilities.
In a case where the evidence is purely circumstantial and establishes nothing more than suspicion, the judge must draw attention to the necessity of some piece of evidence that is more than mere suspicion and which would lead to one conclusion and one conclusion only, that is, to the guilt of the prisoner. One cannot put a multiple of suspicions together and make proof of it. For circumstantial evidence to support a conviction it must be inconsistent with the innocence of the accused, and must lead to the irresistible conclusion not only that the crime charged has been committed, but that it was in fact committed by the person or persons charged and by no other person; in other words the evidence on the whole must exclude the probability that the alleged crime could have been committed by some person or persons other than the person or persons before the court.
No evidence was produced by the plaintiff to show that there was any abnormality about the girl’s pregnancy which could account for a pregnancy lasting fifteen or sixteen months. In these circumstances, the presumption is that the gestation took the normal period of nine months
We thereupon indicated to counsel for the plaintiff-appellant that the burden of proof as to whether or not the defendant respondent abdicated was upon him, and that in view of the defendant-respondent’s positive assertion that he did not abdicate, unless the appellant had some other more conclusive and convincing evidence to prove that the defendant-respondent ceased to be the Assacherehene, the presumption was in the defendant-respondent’s favour that he has at all material times remained Assacherehene.
It is like series of small threads and when put together, make a very strong rope. The same with circumstantial evidence. It is generally accepted that when direct evidence is unavailable, but there are bits and pieces of circumstantial evidence available, and when these are put together they make stronger, corroborative and convincing evidence than direct evidence.
