By Saio Marrah
A Jury in the High Court has cleared one Ntuma Mansaray (Nee Bangura) of killing her soldier-husband, Mamoud Mansaray in Freetown.
The 10-member jury returned a verdict of not guilty because the accused acted in self-defence but two of the jurors maintained their dissenting position even after the jury was initially sent out a second time because four had disagreed with the not guilty verdict. Justice Sulaiman Bah had to redirect the jury before they arrived at the two-thirds decision.
The verdict was greeted with applause by relatives and other sympathizers including church members of the accused in the public gallery.
In his summing up on Monday 11th March 2024, Justice Bah referred to the cause-of-death certificate from the postmortem report, which indicated that the death was a result of stabbing with a knife and that the stabbing was not self-inflicted. He said the evidence revealed that only the accused, the deceased, and their one-year-old and three-month-old baby were in the apartment when the stabbing occurred.
On the issue of intent, the judge called the attention of the jurors to a Whatsapp conversation between the couple who promised to kill each other but that the wife’s threat was retaliation to a death threat made by the deceased.
On the issue of self-defence, Justice Bah referred to a work done by Justice Bankole Thompson, in which he noted that for self-defense to stand in a murder trial, the accused should not initiate the attack, should be threatened by grievous bodily harm, the attack should be immediate and that the accused should be in danger of attack.
The judge pointed to the evidence of the first prosecution witness, a neighbor to the couple who said he was woken up by the noise of fighting between the two and that he overheard the deceased tell the accused “Wait leh ear cam for you” which translates as, “I will be back for you”, after which, the witness said he overheard the deceased crying “she has stabbed me”.
The second prosecution witness told the court about how the accused confessed to him that she stabbed the deceased.
Justice Bah further highlighted the accused’s unsworn statement saying the deceased was her husband she met at the College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences (COMAHS) as a colleague while studying nursing. They fell in love and eventually got married and after the wedding, the accused said her husband began displaying his bad attitude towards her.
She said different people used to come to their homes asking for the husband because he would normally take money from people on the pretext that he would provide accommodation for them. She told the court how her husband usually beat her up whenever she complained about the behavior of her husband’s lovers towards her.
She said it came to a time when her husband was arrested for collecting money from people and offering them fake nursing certificates. She said he was unable to graduate from COMAHS and would have been sacked from the RSLAF had her (the accused’s) father not intervened.
She told the court how her husband usually beat her up, pointing out that she made one complaint to the Congo Cross police station, several complaints to the military police, and his immediate boss. She said she also informed family members.
According to her, in the early hours of 30th March 2020, two ladies came home asking for her husband saying he had to pay them Five Million Old Leones. The accused said when she called the deceased about the issue and expressed her anger over the embarrassment; the deceased became angry saying he had warned her not to meddle in his affairs threatening to end the accused’s life when he returned home that night.
She said when her husband returned home she locked the main entrance and sat behind the door appealing to him to calm down as she usually did but that this time her husband used a metal to open the door and then chased her as she ran into their bedroom.
The accused said she then saw her husband advancing towards her with a knife to kill her while she pleaded with him not to kill her for the sake of their baby daughter but the deceased then replied that he would marry another wife to bring up the child.
The accused said she grabbed their bread knife to repel her husband while still pleading with him not to harm her but when she realized the seriousness of the situation with her husband advancing on her she pushed him back where he fell and she stabbed him on his chest.
Copyright © 2024 Politico (13/03/24)
