While many have signed a petition calling on President Mahama to use his constitutional pardon powers to set the incarcerated Montine Fm’3 three free, an opposing petition has started gaining signatures, requesting that the President should allow them to remain in jail to serve their full sentence.
Now, a Ghanaian Law Professor Kofi Kumado has stepped in to say, President John Dramani Mahama does not have power under the Constitution to grant pardon to three, because of the type of offence they were convicted and sentenced for.
Kumado, as reported by GraphicOnline said: “I have read about a presidential pardon for those lucky journalists. Well, I have gone through our national Constitution and I do not see where it is provided for with respect to the kind of threat for which they were convicted on their own pleas. I am not worried because the President is my friend and I know he is very intelligent. He will never pretend to a power he does not have.”
He explained:
I was taught in the Law Faculty at Legon that the punishment for inchoate offences is the same as for the substantive offences. Thus, if you kill a person, the punishment is death; if you threaten to kill a person, the punishment on conviction for the threat is also death. The same will apply to a threat to kill a judge.
So I think those journalists got off lightly. But if you threaten to kill a judge while he or she is presiding over a case, the threat goes beyond the judge. It is a threat to the institution; it is a threat against one of the pillars of the rule of law. Thus it is a threat against society as a whole. It goes beyond the normal criminal offence.
In any event, I am surprised to read or hear that some of the people who cry daily that our Constitution should be amended because it gives the President too much power are now clamouring for the President to exercise a power he does not have, either under the Constitution or any other law of the land.