“Remorse” Has a Role in the Delivery of Justice

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Dec. 23, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]

“I was not there,” my profuse apologies to Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia, so I cannot presume to second-guess Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood vis-à-vis her decision to allow four of the dismissed 22 lower court judges caught on videotape taking bribes the privilege of drawing their end-of-service or retirement benefits (See “Corrupt Judges Don’t Deserve Benefits – GII” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/8/15).

It is quite indisputably clear that the four district and circuit court judges being privileged with retirement benefits by the Chief Justice are not being disengaged from the judicial service on grounds of having honorably served the nation. Rather, they are, each and every one of them, judicial bad apples being pruned in order to ensure that they do not irreparably contaminate the rest of their colleagues and clerical minions and associates.

I would not try to second-guess Chief Justice Wood on the subject at hand because it well appears that her decision to let four of the 22 dismissed judges and magistrates draw their end-of-service benefits was likely based on the recommendations of the judicial panel set up to probe the forensic sustainability of the yeomanly undercover investigations by Mr. Anas Aremeyaw Anas and his Tiger-Eye PI team. In judicial parlance, what Chief Justice Wood translated into simple English and terms as “remorse” on the part of the “Pardoned Four” may mean something far more complicated than the likes of Mr. Vitus Azeem, Ghana’s local representative of Transparency International, would have the general public believe.

Indeed, the decision probably has more to do with the initial postures of most of the judges caught in the Tiger-Eye PI undercover dragnet. Then also, the actual nature and context in which the alleged bribes were offered and accepted may have something to do with such decision. In legal culture, appearance and reality make quite a sea change of a difference when it comes to the handing down of verdicts and/or judgments. And while ethics and law are discrete components of Social Justice, nevertheless, the two elements of societal balance and harmony are not poles apart.

To be certain, it is almost always never clear-cut, or precise, where the boundaries of ethics and the law intersect or are to be drawn and/or demarcated. One thing, though, is certain; and it is the fact that a huge aspect of what informs the crafting and passage of laws, as well as the application of the same, depends on a people and their society’s sense of ethics or morality, although it is also quite true that a remarkable percentage of laws are not directly morally derived. Which is why some laws have often been maligned as being the equivalent of an “ass.”

Put simply and more pointedly, some laws are so morally disagreeable as to be reckoned as having been crafted by a covey of clinical cretins. But it is still the law and may be contravened at a great risk or penalty to the culprit. Needless to say, I, too, am down with those who are demanding the crucifixion of the dismissed judges and magistrates. But the reality of the inner workings of the justice system is quite another breed of quadruped altogether. There are too many legal technicalities involved here that are fully protected by the country’s Fourth-Republican Constitution, such as the legality, or the lack thereof, by which the incriminating evidence against these dismissed judicial operatives was obtained. This aspect of the judicial enquiry into the activities of the culprits may very well have decided the critical question of whether in spite of their inescapable collective criminal culpability, nevertheless, some of the guilty judges deserved to have their portion of the delivery of condign justice tempered with mercy.