TETTEH ASAMADEY ALIAS OSAGYEFO AND ANOTHER v. COMMISSIONER OF POLICE

JUDGMENT OF SOWAH J.

The appellants were on the 20th June, 1963, each convicted and sentenced to six months imprisonment for pretending to be public officers and six months imprisonment for defrauding one Salifu Dagomba, the sentences to run consecutively in the two cases.

Unfortunately, the learned magistrate did not record the facts given by the prosecution after the plea of guilty, and which facts must have influenced him to impose such severe sentences. I am of the opinion that it is incumbent upon a magistrate to record the facts of the offence as given by the prosecution after a plea of guilty, because it is on those facts that the severity or otherwise of sentence depends. Furthermore a convicted person entitled to appeal against his sentence even though he had entered a plea of guilty. An appellate court can only properly deal with such an appeal when the facts have been recorded.

In this case however the facts of the case sufficiently show up in the two counts. In the first case, the appellants were in the first count charged with pretending to be public officers who under such colour arrested one Salifu Dagomba. The second count shows that the pretence was assumed in order to defraud the said Salifu Dagomba on the sum of £G2.

Counsel for the appellants submitted that in such a case the procedure to be followed in imposing sentence is outlined in sections 302 and 303 of the Criminal Procedure Code, 1960.1 In my view where a person does several acts each of which is an offence in itself, but where the acts were done in the execution of one grand design, the prosecution could elect to charge the accused person with only the main act which is the end result of the several criminal acts, and if the accused is convicted the court is entitled to have regard to the other acts in imposing sentence. Where, however, the prosecution elects to charge the person with the several acts in the same indictment or summons, then even though the person is found guilty of each of the several acts, the sentence on each count must run concurrently with sentences in other acts. In this connection I will refer to the case of R.v. Kamara.2

The appellants in that case were charged with : (a) conspiracy to commit an offence, to wit to set fire to houses, (b) being riotously assembled together they demolished several houses, and (c) being riotously assembled together they demolished the house of one Amber Scott.

[p.402]

It was held that all the three counts relate on