If he has been paying sedulous attention to the ongoing presidential-election campaign right here in the United States, the author of “Montie Trio: Matters Arising out of Supreme Court Ruling” (Ghanaweb.com 8/8/16) would be aware of the nationwide controversy surrounding an inflammatory remark made on the stumps by the clinically rambunctious nominee of the Republican Party, Mr. Donald J. Trump, to the effect that should his main political opponent, Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton, defeat the former in the intense race for the White House and attempt to enforce the direly needed gun-control laws, which are a significant plank of the Democratic Party’s electioneering-campaign agenda, staunch believers of the 2nd Amendment to the U. S. Constitution have every right to assassinate the former United States’ Senator from New York. Actually, Mr. Trump had used the expression “Supporters of the Second Amendment know how to stop Hillary Clinton.”
Appearing on the Cable News Network (CNN), a retired General of the United States’ Military with conservative Republican Party leanings stated emphatically that if an ordinary member of the Trump audience that had gathered in the auditorium where the New York-based billionaire business mogul is widely reported to have made his inexcusably reckless remark had been heard making a similar remark, this time directed at the morbidly cantankerous Mr. Trump, that audience member would have been promptly arrested by U. S. Secret Service personnel and taken in (or ferried to the headquarters of the agency) for questioning. To be certain, as of this writing, agents of the U.S. Secret Service were reported to have questioned, and were still questioning, some major Trump campaign operatives.
But curiously, somehow, the author of “Matters Arising” would have Ghanaians and the rest of the global community believe that it is hunky-dory or kosher (my profuse apologies to adherents of the Jewish culture and religion, including myself, of course) for the members of the Montie Gang to threaten to sexually violate Chief Justice Wood, as well as assassinate her along with at least five other associate justices of the Supreme Court of Ghana.
Well, the immutable fact of the matter is that no civilized constitutional democracy anywhere around the globe affords “free speech” protection to either members of the general public or media operatives who either intemperately issue death threats and/or incite the same on grounds of either personal and private animosity towards the target of such lethal threats, or on grounds of political and/or ideological dissent.
The author of “Matters Arising” deftly, albeit sophistically, argues that certain portions of Ghana’s 1992 Constitution, which he suavely conflates with the country’s 1979 Constitution, on grounds that the crafting of constitutions is scarcely akin to reinventing the wheel, allows for discretionary or summary appropriation of judicial power in certain special circumstances, except that he is hermetically convinced that absolutely no member of the Wood Supreme Court is in any way shape or form entitled to the appropriation and/or expression of the same judicial privilege(s). He also cavalierly ignores the fact that the immured contemnors, namely, Messrs. Salifu Maase (aka Mugabe), Godwin Ako Gunn and Alistair Nelson were duly represented by their own high-powered defense attorneys.
If these defense counsel had proven themselves to be either unequal to their tasks or woefully ill-prepared to defend their clients, could the justices of the Supreme Court be justifiably faulted for such exhibition of gross professional incompetence? What is also quizzically interesting here is the fact that although the critic appears to fully appreciate the fact that under certain special circumstances, the members of the Apex Court are privileged to act the roles of prosecutor, judge and jury, nonetheless, he simply cannot bring himself to accept the fact that such privileges also apply to the members of the Wood Supreme Court.
The critic also performs a tendentious legal acrobatics when instead of poignantly carping the Attorney-General for unduly politicizing her executive arm of the judiciary, he cavalierly presumes Mrs. Marietta Brew Appiah-Oppong’s egregious inaction to be inextricably predicated on some unexplained constitutional deficiencies that appear to have stultified either her desire or duty to rise up to the occasion.
Maybe we also need to discuss the reason(s) why President Mahama woefully failed to submit the public and media grievances against his favorite political pet, or sidekick, Mr. Stanislav Dogbe, to the Council-of-State before taking a decision on the matter of Mr. Dogbe’s brutal mauling of a young radio reporter with the state-owned Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC), sometime late last year or early this year. We, of course, intend to subject the Dogbe controversy to the same scrutiny as that surrounding the case of the Montie Gang.