OLLENNU J.S.C.: This appeal is against conviction of the appellant for murder upon a verdict of a jury. It raised some very important points of law. These have been forcefully argued on both sides. Although some of the points made are interesting, they are nevertheless irrelevant for the determination of the appeal; it would therefore be enough just to mention the most important of them in passing, and then proceed to the main points upon which the decision turned.
The appellant, the victim of the crime, one Mama Vagala, and the principal witness in the case lived in Sawla, a town in the Northern Region of Ghana. The case for the prosecution is that on the night of 7 March 1962, at about 11 p.m. the first prosecution witness, a woman who traded in pito and akpeteshie drinks, was sleeping on a mat outside her room when she was awakened by a noise coming from the direction of her room indicating that some one had entered the room. She thereupon shouted three times asking who it was that…