Matters/Appellate
Dismass Alu Adoon v. Federal Republic of Nigeria
An appellate defence built entirely on the trial record, where documents relied on in the judgment had never lawfully entered evidence.
Forum
Court of Appeal
Year
2018
Discipline
Appellate
Outcome
Conviction quashed
The background
What happened
The appellant was convicted at first instance and sentenced on documentary evidence produced through a witness who could not speak to its making.
Objections taken at trial were noted but never ruled on, and the judgment relied on the documents as if admitted without qualification.
We were instructed after conviction, with the notice of appeal already close to expiry.
The question for the court
Whether a conviction can stand where the trial court founded its findings on documents admitted without a proper foundation and over unresolved objection.
Counsel
Appellate team led from Lagos, with local counsel in Makurdi
Result
- The Court of Appeal quashed the conviction and set aside the sentence.
- The appellant was discharged.
- The court restated the duty of a trial court to rule on admissibility when the objection is taken.
A comparable matter?
If this resembles something live, a partner will take the call.
+234 816 899 4065How it was argued
The case we put
Three lines of argument, run together rather than in the alternative.
Read the record, not the narrative
We transcribed and indexed the whole trial record and mapped every finding in the judgment to the evidence said to support it. Three central findings had no admissible source at all.
Unruled objections are live objections
Where a trial court defers a ruling on admissibility and never returns to it, the objection survives to appeal. The prosecution's answer — that the appellant had waived the point — could not survive the transcript.
No proviso to save it
With the inadmissible material excised, what remained could not sustain the count. That closed off any argument that no miscarriage of justice had occurred.
Why it matters
A reminder that appellate work is archival before it is oratorical: the case was won in the transcript months before it was argued.
Court of Appeal · 2018
See the full ledger
Instruct us
Bring us the matter others have called difficult
Urgent injunctive and enforcement matters are triaged the same day. Everything else is acknowledged within one business day.
Confidential enquiry