Wakilii

Mushikoma Watete & 3 Ors v Uganda (Criminal Appeal 10 of 2000)

Supreme Court · [2000] UGSC 11 · 2000 Appeal Dismissed ✦ AI-generated summary ↓ Download
Jurisdiction
Uganda
Case Type
Second criminal appeal from a Court of Appeal decision affirming High Court murder convictions and death sentences
Decision
Appeal dismissed; convictions for murder and sentences of death affirmed

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Holding

The Supreme Court dismissed a second appeal against murder convictions and death sentences. It held that an accused bears no burden of proving an alibi, but an alibi must be put forward as an answer to the charge at trial; the appellants' charge-and-caution statements, tendered to show the timing of their arrests, did not become their trial defence, so the courts below correctly found no alibi was raised. PW2 was not an accomplice, since mere passive attendance at a meeting and failure to report it did not amount to participation in the offence. There is no rule requiring a corroboration warning for a witness with a purpose of his own to serve; such purpose is only a credibility factor. The Court of Appeal had amply re-evaluated the evidence.

Facts

On 6 December 1995, the deceased, a tailor, was at her workplace at Kikholo Trading Centre when a mob surrounded her and seized her. She was assaulted with sticks, clubs, pangas and stones, allegedly because her brother had kept instruments of witchcraft with her. She was taken to Bushika Sub-county headquarters, where a parish chief unsuccessfully urged the mob to take her to police instead of punishing her, and was finally dumped at Bududa Police Station, where she died. Medical examination found the cause of death to be internal brain haemorrhage. The four appellants were said to have been part of the mob and to have each actively participated in the assault. The case rested on two eyewitnesses, the deceased's daughter (PW3) and a parish chief (PW2), who recognised the appellants among the attackers and described their respective roles. PW2 also testified that elders had earlier convened a meeting resolving that persons practising witchcraft should be dealt with, which he attended but said he disapproved of.

Issues

  1. Whether the first, second and third appellants had set up a defence of alibi which the courts below failed to consider.
  2. Whether the contents of a charge-and-caution statement tendered in evidence automatically become the accused's answer to the charge at trial.
  3. Whether PW2 was an accomplice witness, or a witness with a purpose of his own to serve, whose evidence required corroboration.
  4. Whether the Court of Appeal failed to properly re-evaluate the evidence as a whole.

Orders

  • The appeal fails and is dismissed.

Key headnotes

Defence of Alibi — Burden of Proof
An accused person who puts forward an alibi assumes no burden of proving it; the burden remains on the prosecution to prove that the accused was at the scene of the crime and not at the place he claims to have been.
Defence of Alibi — Must Be Raised as Answer to the Charge
An alibi must be put forward as an answer to the charge at trial; the contents of an accused's charge-and-caution statement, tendered in evidence for a different purpose, do not automatically become his defence merely because the statement was produced.
Accomplice Evidence — Who Is an Accomplice
A witness is an accomplice only where he participated, as principal or accessory, in the offence under trial; mere passive attendance at a meeting, and failure to report it, does not render a witness a participant requiring his evidence to be corroborated.
Corroboration — Witness with a Purpose of His Own to Serve
There is no legal requirement to treat a witness who has a purpose of his own to serve in a special way or to give a corroboration warning; such a purpose is merely one of the factors the court considers when assessing the witness's credibility.

Legislation cited (1)

  • Local Government (Resistance Councils) Statute No. 15 of 1993 s.33(1)(f) and (h)

Cases cited (7)

  • Woolmington v Director of Public Prosecutions [1935] AC 462
  • Obeli v Uganda (1965) EA 622
  • D.R. Khetan v R (1957) EA 563
  • Kamau v Republic (1965) EA 501
  • R v Beck (1982) 1 All ER 807
  • R v Prater (1960) 1 All ER 298
  • R v Stannard (1964) 1 All ER 34
Source: this page presents Wakilii’s issue analysis and metadata for a publicly reported Ugandan judgment. Any AI-generated summary is marked as such. Judgment text is sourced from the Uganda Legal Information Institute (ulii.org). Wakilii is not affiliated with ULII.