Media reportage on 10-yr-old boy killed in Kasoa wrong – Martin Kpebu

Lawyer Martin Kpebu says the media's way of reporting the trending case involving two juveniles who are alleged to have killed a 10-year-old boy in Kasoa for money rituals, was wrong.

According to him, it was unlawful for some sections of the media to disclose the identities of the suspects.

“Starting from the beginning, I should say that so far, as a country we have not handled this matter well especially in the media space. There is clear evidence that one of them is 16 years old. In actual fact even when it started, the evidence was that they both were under 18 and yet the media went down showing their credentials,” Martin Kpebu said. “That is wrong. It is a crime under the juvenile justice act. Journalists could go to jail and there are fines so let us do well to hide the identities of the juveniles.

“Teenagers are still developing. Their brains are still developing so when it comes to discretion, they are juveniles. They are more prone to make mistakes and commit crimes. We, therefore, need to give them a second chance. I have heard so many people mounting the high horse and crucifying these juveniles. That is something we should reject unreservedly,” Martin Kpebu said on Citi TV’s ‘The Big Issue’ monitored by GhanaWeb.

10-year-old Ishmael Mensah Abdallah was killed by two of his friends in Kasoa in the Central Region on Saturday, April 3.

The two, per the police charge sheet, admitted that they killed the 10-year-old boy by hitting his neck with a club.

This was after luring him into an uncompleted building under the guise of selling him a video game at Lamptey Mills, a suburb of Kasoa in the Central Region.

This development has incensed a large segment of the Ghanaian society who are calling for an end to the appearance of spiritualists and Mallams on sponsored television programmes.

The spiritualists promise unreasonable get-rich-quick avenues for the unsuspecting youth.