By Mohamed Foday Conteh
Justice John Bosco Allieu has sentenced a 43-year-old labourer, Augustine Sannoh to 10 years imprisonment for the unlawful killing of Foday Bangura at Pepper Wharf, Tombo Village in the Western Area Rural District .
The State Prosecutor led in a total of five witnesses who testified against the man.
Desmond Conteh, a Police investigator attached to the Tombo Police Station said that he was at work when a certain Hassan brought Sannoh on allegations that he has killed someone at Pepper Wharf, Tombo Village.
The officer said he later visited the crime scene and found Bangura lying dead. Another witness for the prosecution was Detective Police Constable 12669, Foday Mansaray who said that it was on the 4th January this year that he received a case file with a pair of scissors.
The constable said that he and the Scene of Crime Officer (SoCO) visited the crime scene and that the latter took snapshots of where the incident occurred.
The final witness for the prosecution was Dr. Simeon Owizz Koroma, the pathologist that conducted an autopsy on the corpse of Bangura on the 9th January 2021 -seven days after he was killed.
The pathologist concluded that Bangura died of profuse bleeding due to acute haemorrhagic shock from a stab wound. In simple terms, the doctor said that Bangura died an unnatural death.
Sannoh depended on his voluntary caution statement (VCS) he made to the police during the investigation.
In the said VCS, he confessed to the killing of Bangura and went further to narrate the sequence of events that led him to stab the deceased to death.
He said that there was a quarrel between him and Bangura over a fish basket since he was responsible for operations on the wharf, whilst three other men were responsible for offloading.
Sannoh said that the quarrel later transformed into a fight and that it was Bangura who first hit him hard and even pelted him with a stone on the head that led to him bleeding. He said that while all this was happening, the other men were cheering Bangura and at the same time teasing him of being a lazy old man.
He said that that provoked him to get hold of a pair of scissors which he used to stab Bangura twice which eventually led to his death.
Evidence in court points out that Sannoh, 10 months later denied the allegations when put to him. He said that he went to the police after the deceased hit him with a stone and it was there that one of the onlookers during the incident met and told the Police that he has killed someone at Pepper Wharf.
The judge addressed the jurors to be cognisant of the evidence in court and admonished them to consider the option of manslaughter if they think that the accused was provoked by alias Bomba and others.
He also informed them that the action of the accused cannot be equated to self-defence since injuries from a stone cannot be commensurate to that of a scissors.
The 11-man jury retired at 16:23 and returned at 17:05 with a guilty verdict of manslaughter. Sannoh, a man with five children and a wife, was sentenced to 10 years for manslaughter instead of murder on the fact that he was provoked by the taunting from the onlookers.
Copyright © Político Online 22/11/21
