Ibadan husband killer bags seven years for manslaughter

  

A female lawyer, Yewande Oyediran, who was accused of killing her husband, Lowo, was on Monday sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment by Justice Muntar Abimbola of the Oyo State High Court, sitting in Ibadan, Oyo State, for manslaughter.

The former worker of the Department of Public Prosecutions in the Oyo State Ministry of Justice was accused of killing her husband with a knife after a disagreement on February 2, 2016, at their residence in the Akobo area of Ibadan. The disagreement was said to have arisen after Yewande accused her France-based husband, Lowo, of infidelity.

The offence was said to be contrary to Section 316 and punishable under Section 319 of the Law of Oyo State.

She was subsequently arrested and arraigned, but she pleaded not guilty to the murder charge preferred against her.

According to Justice Abimbola, her seven year jail sentence was to start running from the day of her arrest.

In justifying the sentence, the court said the convict was charged on a murder count by the prosecution and that although evidence pointed to her as the killer of her husband, witnesses presented by the defence counsel failed to establish the intent behind the killing.

The court held that going by the relationship between Yewande and Lowo as husband and wife, the killing was done without intent.

The court observed that from the evidence before it, the couple, who had no child together since they got married in 2014, constantly engaged in domestic violence.

The judge explained that the crime was not premeditated or intentional and that it was as a result of marital disagreement between a husband and his wife, adding that it was a case of manslaughter and not murder, which could have attracted death penalty.

Yewande’s lead counsel, Leye Adepoju, pleaded for lenient judgement after the judge established that the killing was not premeditated.

Adepoju argued that a long sentence would ruin the accused’s life, having suffered greatly as a result of what happened.

He also asked the judge to send Yewande to a correctional facility where she would be reformed, instead of a prison.

In passing the judgement, Justice Abimbola said, “All parties agreed that Lowo was stabbed. The death was not a natural one; the stabbing was not a self-inflicted one; the stabbing was not an act of God; and the defendant was the only direct witness. But the prosecution failed to carry out forensic test on the knife to ascertain whether it was the one tendered that was actually used in the stabbing or not.

“I also reject the injury on the deceased being a result of intervention from a third party. Who then is the assailant? The assailant is the defendant. She did not deny this in her statement. Can we say that the deceased stabbed himself or it was an act of God? The defendant, having been seen with a knife, and the deceased, having been stabbed with a pair of scissors earlier, and the fact that the defendant was last seen with the deceased and was holding a knife, could be said to be direct and positive circumstantial evidence.

“I cannot but hold that the defendant was the attacker. She accepted that a knife was involved, and there was no serious mark of injury on her, but only a bump on her head; there was no abnormal bleeding on her. Her clothes were intact. I can rightly infer that the defendant caused the injury after the encounter of fight. The defendant unlawfully caused the death of the deceased and I so, find her guilty of manslaughter.

“Having considered the plea of leniency from the defence counsel and the plea of allocatus with the series of evidence before me, I hereby sentence the defendant to seven years’ imprisonment starting from the time of her arrest.”

The private prosecutor engaged by the state Ministry of Justice to prosecute the case, Mr. Akinyele Sanyaolu, said after the judgement was pronounced that he was satisfied with the sentence.

“I am satisfied with the judgement, but I don’t know whether the state will be happy or not. The court has really done a great job. The court was able to establish between murder and manslaughter in matrimonial matters, and that was why it came to the issue of intention, which was why the court didn’t sentence the accused to death because they were married and the law presumed that she did not have the intention to kill her husband,” he added.