Montie 3: Contemnors deserved 10 or 20 months - Ndebugri

A private legal practitioner John Ndebugri has described the four-month jail term handed the Montie 3 by the Supreme Court as too lenient.

According to Ndebugri, the court should have been harsher to serve as a deterrent to others. Host of Montie FM’s political talk show ‘Pampaso’ Salifu Maase, popularly known as ‘Mugabe’, and two panelists, Alistair Nelson, and Godwin Ako Gunn both of the National Democratic Congress were jailed four months by the Supreme Court on Wednesday for contempt.

Directors and owners of the station were also found guilty of contempt and have been fined GHc30, 000, to be paid to the court by close of Thursday or face a jail term of one month. Lawyers for the contemnors have described the sentences as “too harsh and excessive”. But speaking to Starr News Ndebugri said the public must draw lessons from the Supreme Court judgment.

“Too harsh, it cannot be too harsh. When you have sat in a studio and have threatened the judges of the highest court of the land that if they decide a case in one way or the other you are going to kill them. That’s very serious, very serious. So I don’t think that it’s too harsh. I think that it even was very measured and it was just meant to send the message to you journalists and to all of us,” Ndebugri said.

“Four months, maybe if I was sitting there I could have decided ten months; I could have decided 20 months,” the former PNC lawmaker added.

Background

Alistair Nelson and Godwin Ako Gunn, who were panelists on ‘Pampaso’, a political programme on Montie FM in Accra on June 29, warned judges of Ghana’s highest court to be wary of their conduct in the case involving the Electoral Commission and Mr. Abu Ramadan if they did not want to suffer the fate of the three members of the bench who were shot to death and burnt on June 30, 1982 in the era of the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC).