Private legal practitioner, Martin Kpebu has refuted claims by lawyers of former President John Dramani Mahama that the Supreme has not been fair to their client for dismissing an application for review of its previous ruling regarding Mr. Mahama’s application to serve interrogatories on the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission.
Lawyers of the former president, who is in the Apex Court challenging the outcome of the 2020 election, expressed disappointment over the dismissal of the review application which sought to reverse the court’s earlier ruling dismissing the request by Mr. Mahama to demand answers from the EC Chairperson to questions known in legal parlance as interrogatories.
The Supreme Court, even before dismissing the application for review, had earlier dismissed another application by the former president through his lawyers seeking to replace a paragraph of the original statement of case as well as file a supplement to their statement of case requesting for a review.
But speaking to the media after Court’s proceedings on Thursday, January 28, 2021, Spokesperson of Mr. Mahama’s legal team and former Attorney General, Marietta Brew Appiah-Oppong said the dismissal of the applications is an indication that Mr. Mahama is not being given a fair hearing.
She argued that the Apex Court, in previous rulings particularly in the 2012 election petition, granted similar applications and thus, dismissing Mr. Mahama’s application is an act of unfairness.
Mr. Kpebu, however, debunked the claim of unfair treatment against the former president.
According to him, the Supreme Court is not bound by its previous decisions and so, a departure from its rulings in the past cannot be said to be an act of injustice meted out to the Petitioner, Mr. Mahama.
For him, although the court had previously ruled on similar matters, the circumstances under which this case is being adjudicated is different from the previous ones hence, the court’s departure.
“There is one cardinal principal that we can’t run away from which is that the Supreme Court can always depart from its previous decisions. So though you find that in the 2012 petition, they said they were persuaded to apply order 22 of the High Court rules, in this particular one because of the 42 day limit and you could see, reading from the ruling, that that was one of the factors that influenced the court.
So the Court has departed. Let’s look at the substantive case. Moving forward, Mr. Mahama’s lawyers can ask those questions when it comes to cross-examination,” he said.
The Supreme Court, in dismissing the application for a review, contended that the application fall short of the threshold required for a review.
Chief Justice, Kwasi Anin-Yeboah who chaired the nine-member panel explained that Mr. Mahama’s lawyers neither demonstrated any exceptional circumstance necessitating a review nor provided new evidence which would convince the Justices to take a different view thus, the dismissal.
The Court adjourned hearing of the case to today when the hearing of the substantive case is expected to commence.
