TETTEH ASAMADEY ALIAS OSAGYEFO AND ANOTHER vs. COMMISSIONER OF POLICE

The appellants were on the 20th June, 1963, each convicted and sentenced to six months imprisonment for pretending to be public officers and six months imprisonment for defrauding one Salifu Dagomba, the sentences to run consecutively in the two cases. Unfortunately, the learned magistrate did not record the facts given by the prosecution after the plea of guilty, and which facts must have influenced him to impose such severe sentences. I am of the opinion that it is incumbent upon a magistrate to record the facts of the offence as given by the prosecution after a plea of guilty, because it is on those facts that the severity or otherwise of sentence depends. Furthermore a convicted person entitled to appeal against his sentence even though he had entered a plea of guilty. An appellate court can only properly deal with such an appeal when the facts have been recorded. In this case however the facts of the case sufficiently show up in the two counts. In the first case, the appellants ...