A Private Legal Practitioner, lawyer Gary Nimako Marfo says it is unheard of in any civil case that the burden of proof can be extracted from the defendant as the lawyers of the petitioner of the 2020 election petition sought to do.
He maintained that the burden of proof solely relies on the complainant and in the case of the petitioner, the burden was on him to prove in court why the judges should grant all his reliefs for him.
“If you ask any lawyer who goes to court in a civil case that who has the burden of proof, the lawyer will tell you that the burden of proof lies in the hand of the complainant, and in this case, the petitioner,” he argued.
Speaking on Okay FM’s 'Ade Akye Abia' Morning Show, lawyer Gary Nimako insisted that the complainant has to take his evidence to court as the judges were not there when the incident happened.
“ . . so it is you, the complainant or the petitioner who has to provide evidence to support your case in court. You will then plead with the judges to depend on the evidence provided to pass their judgment for you,” he emphasized.
“But you don’t go to court to say that you are waiting and when it gets to cross-examination on the other side then you can prove your case through the defendant. In an arbitrary system, it is not done that way because if the defendant does not mount the witness box for cross-examination, how do you get your evidence from that person as it happened in the Supreme Court?” he questioned.
He, however, posited that it is manifestly clear that the lawyers of Mr John Dramani Mahama went to court to gamble for evidence but it did not go well as they were hoping to hang their case on the cross-examination.
“If you say publicly that you have won an election and pushed people to go on a demonstration and also burned tyres, as well as NDC MPs marching to the EC office and then you went to court to say that you did not win the election but no candidate won and so we should go for a second run. The NDC wanted to gamble for evidence,” he indicated.
To him, the petitioner’s case started to crumble from the day he [John Mahama] and some leaders of the NDC claimed publicly that Mahama had won the Presidential election and also had 140 seats in Parliament but went to the Supreme Court with a completely different case.
He held the view that the petitioner should have maintained his stance in the Supreme Court that he won the election and then provide evidence through the pink sheets contrary to the irregularities done by the EC’s officials to buttress his claim of victory.
He wondered why the largest opposition NDC did not go to the Supreme Court with their pink sheets as evidence if they actually sat down to calculate to know the votes they had in the Presidential Election and indeed John Mahama won.
“They know that if they should go to court with their pink sheets to calculate the President Election result, John Mahama did not win the election and that is the reason why they did not go to Supreme Court with their pink sheets,” he opined.
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Source: Daniel Adu Darko/Peacefmonline.com
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