JUDGMENT OF VAN LARE J.S.C.
Van Lare J.S.C. delivered the judgment of the court. The appellants were jointly charged with two other persons with the offence of the murder of one Kwame Nsonamoah at Sekodumasi village in the Ashanti Region on the 22nd July, 1961. The trial came before Apaloo, J., sitting with a jury in the High Court, Kumasi, when the appellants were convicted on the charge preferred and the two others acquitted. The deceased was found bleeding from punctured wounds in the neck and on the head, lying on the ground in front of his store late in the evening of the day alleged in the charge. He was then alive but could answer no questions, and was conveyed the same night by lorry to the hospital at Kumasi where he died three days later without regaining consciousness. According to the medical evidence, the cause of death was fracture of the skull and laceration of the brain due to gun shot wounds. The police saw pellet holes on the wall of the verandah where the deceased was discovered in a pool of blood; there were also seen at the spot, some round iron balls resembling pellets, and about 65 feet away were found two small pieces of cardboard believed to be cartridge covers. The inference was that the deceased while on the verandah in front of his store on the evening in question was fired at from a distance. The prosecution was unable to produce an eye witness as to how the deceased sustained the injuries from which he died but put forward the following case.
The first appellant, a relative of the deceased, had a protracted illness which he suspected had been caused by juju or poison believed to have been procured by the deceased and given to his, first appellant's, wife to put into his food; the first appellant on one occasion sent a letter to his said wife telling her that he would deal drastically with the deceased. Some few days before the event leading to the charge, the first appellant casually borrowed a double-barrelled gun from a man in a village where he went to demand a debt, and took the gun back with him to Kumasi where he lived. On the evening prior to the eventful night, both appellants in company of one of the two others who have been acquitted, visited the village of Sekodumasi, where the deceased was shot; and again the appellants, now with the two others, travelled to the said village and were in that village on the eventful night. The driver of the taxi cab in which the men travelled, by name Kwasi Kankam, testified that
