Part of what the author wrote was that:
“For nearly three years until 2018, Numan was the site of a murderous war between sedentary farmers and armed pastoralists. No one knows the number who lost their lives in this conflict… In suggesting that Sunday Jackson had a reasonable means of escape, the Supreme Court showed almost blissful lack of awareness of the nature of the conflict on the floodplains of the Benue River (and its tributaries)… The standard of evidentiary assessment deployed by the Supreme Court required Sunday Jackson to possess almost divine knowledge of the surrounding circumstances. Asking him to run in the middle of this required him to be certain that there was no other danger around him. There was no way that he or anyone could in the middle of an active conflict zone have attained that degree of knowledge or awareness…”
What did the High Court (HC) find as fact on this point?
Did defence counsel raise the circumstance of war as a peculiar defining consideration for the HC in the evaluation of the evidence?
If so, what did the HC say after considering the point? If not, did counsel concede that the present facts were not conditioned by the farmer – herder war? In the event, would it be right for the HC judge to ignore the facts as presented by the parties through their counsel and instead to conjure his own facts and thereupon to rule according to imagination?
More importantly, did the appellant raise these extenuating circumstances on intermediate appeal to the Court of Appeal (CA)?
What did the CA decide about the credibility and validity or not of the point?
If the three justices of appeal upheld the findings of the HC judge on this question of fact, shall we say that the four adjudicators were incompetent or biased against this particular accused person? Why?
It is only after the answers to the foregoing questions that, on this matter of pure facts (there’s no shred of disputation on law here) that we can meaningfully question what the additional five justices of the Supreme Court (SC) did or did not do in reviewing the judgments of lower courts through the judgment and record of appeal at the intermediate appellate court.
This would be a minimum of nine experienced lawyers who became judges and who have intimately listened directly to the witnesses (whom we have not seen or listened to) and or have directly had access to and studied all the relevant documents admitted into evidence where the parties and witnesses had mostly contemporaneously stated what had or had not transpired; and, even read and seen material that although produced in evidence had eventually not been admitted as exhibits for use in the evaluation and judgment (much of which merely reading the judgment we have had no access to).
It is possible that nine judges in three tiers of our superior courts and with the assistance of competent counsel (some with Nigerian and international legal certifications) had nevertheless concurrently but wrongly ruled one way on the facts. But if this is the case, any neutral lawyer is entitled to require evidence of error or misconduct much higher than just a speculative criticism about an ongoing herder-farmer war. Otherwise, we might as well submit that in any site of bloody conflict, regardless of evidence in particular cases, cold-blooded murder is permissible and requirements that trigger our laws on self-defence are suspended!
Surely that cannot be the case because even in the field of declared international war, a soldier who shoots a surrendering soldier is treated no better than any other villainous murderer!
