Alarming number of trial errors nullify serious convictions

When almost half of the criminal appeals heard by a country's apex court lead to decisions that the trials were a nullity or fatally defective in some way and that conviction and sentence must be set aside, you know there is a problem. This is the situation in Tanzania where the Court of Appeal delivered 44 judgments between 29 November and 14 December 2018. Of these, 15 involved civil appeals, and the balance of 29 were criminal appeals. Of the criminal appeals, nine were not actually heard by the court because the cases were not ready, were not properly before the court, or for some other reason. In five cases the appeal was dismissed. In two cases the sentence was changed. In two cases the appeal was upheld because of shortcomings in the prosecution evidence, and the accused declared wrongly convicted. In addition, the appeal was upheld in a further 11 cases because the trial was a 'nullity' due to fundamental defects in the way the matter was conducted, and the accused was to be set free. In her A Matter of Justice column on the Legalbrief site, legal writer Carmel Rickard says this points to what appears to be an urgent, even critical, systemic problem, and asks why Tanzania's highest court or the country's justice authorities have not reacted to it.