11. Extended Visit to the United States and Return to the Judiciary

We arrived at Dulles Airport, Washington D.C., on 2 January 1973. Washington is 7 hours behind Finland. We had gone from Kimito to Helsinki Airport the same morning, so had started from there at about 5 am. By the time we arrived in the afternoon of 2 January, we had been on the road or in the air for nearly twenty four hours. We were tired but a whole afternoon and evening lay ahead of us in America. We were met at Dulles Airport in Washington D.C. by Bill and Beppy De Pree, who invited us to stay with them for as long as we liked while looking for a place of our own. The second day, after reporting to the Woodrow Wilson Center which is in the old Smithsonian Institution Castle in Jefferson Avenue, we started, with Bill driving us round, looking at likely places for accommodation. They themselves lived in Bethesda, Maryland, but we thought that area would be too expensive for us. Our searches were, however, confined to the Maryland and Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C. This was because of the education of the children. Washington D.C. itself had a reputation for poor quality publicly funded schools; classes were too large and teachers were too few per student. If the children were not to be sent to the publicly funded schools, we would find the private schools too expensive. But in Silver Springs and adjoining counties of Maryland and in Fairfax County of Virginia, the publicly funded education system was supposed to be the best in the country. We had to look for a place in which to reside, which would automatically entitle us to free public school education for the children. We did not find anything suitable on the second day. When Bill suggested that we do the same thing on the third day, I asked him whether he was not going to work. He had taken ten days off at the State Department to help us find accommodation. Leif Muten, our Swedish friend working with the IMF, who had visited us a few times in Accra on IMF missions and who lived in the Lake Barcroft area of Virginia, suggested that we take and look after the house of a friend who was away for a number of months, I believe, in California. We were sceptical about taking on the furnished accommodation of another, especially with our small children. We did not know how we could explain or replace anything that we broke or destroyed. But succumbing to Leif's persuasion, we went with him to see the house. It was, indeed, a beautiful house, large and beautifully furnished with all kinds of personal items. We immediately took fright and told Leif that we could not, under any circumstances, take it. We eventually found an apartment in the newly developed area of Reston in Fairfax County, Virginia to which Bill took us. Reston was then a few years old. It had quite a number of middle ranking government officials working in Washington D.C. The environment reminded us of a Scandinavian countryside. It was quite acceptable. With the help of Leif and ***~[* ask mum ]~ Muten,~[* double check Mutein? ]~ we moved into the apartment.

We easily put the children in Forest Edge School, a good publicly funded school. We always thought that the Americans made too little noise about their education system than it deserved. Education in the publicly funded schools was free. Reston had the additional advantage that it had been built with the safety of children in mind so that children could walk from their various homes on side- and overhead-walks, through bridges and tunnels to school without having to cross a road. Ralph was twelve by this time; Tossan was seven and Juliet was five by this time. We could send them off walking to school about half a mile away without any worry about cars. Although we were in Washington for a year, we knew that Ralph would have to return to Ghana towards September of the year to begin secondary school at Achimota, my alma mater. As our friend, Kwame Kwarteng, who was then working at the IMF, said it was in Ghana where the competition for them in life was going to be. So, he also had a boy who was working towards the same entrance examination to take him to Achimota later that year.

We bought an old blue Volvo from Kwame Kwarteng. But I did not have to drive it to work every day because there was a bus service which took the number of public servants working in Washington D.C. to work in the morning and bringing them back to Reston after work. It was most convenient to take the bus because it stopped in Washington at a few strategic public office points, one of which was near the Smithsonian. By the time we came to live in Reston, the drinking of alcohol in the transit buses had been stopped. It made the users too happy and rowdy.

I was welcomed to the Woodrow Wilson Center by Fran Hunter at the reception desk. It was she who had made me aware that I was late in taking up my fellowship by asking me where I had been all this time. She was a gem and we soon became good friends. The Director of the Center was Jim Read, who had worked at some earlier point in life with Franklin Williams. He was a very courteous and sympathetic man whom I was to see from time to time as he was interested in my progress on my project. He, however, did not last very long in that position while I was there and was succeeded by James Billington, whom Stella remembered as a contemporary in Oxford. I was soon introduced to the ways of the Center. I had an office in one of the turrets of the Castle. I was given secretarial assistance, access to the Center's library, which was not large at the time, and to the Library of Congress. If I needed a book or material on a long-term basis, it could be borrowed or photo-copied for me from the Library of Congress or from one of the libraries on the inter-library exchange system, which was of an extensive nature. I was then simply invited to get along with my project. The scholars at the Centre constituted a formidable array of talent, promise and achievement. My neighbour was Dick Smyser, who was later to accompany Henry Kissinger, when the Secretary of State, on his first visit to China. I visited them from time to time to clear my head of befuddlement whenever reading or writing became too difficult. The Center was then quite new. It had about 35 scholars, of whom slightly more than half were American and the remainder from other countries. Some of the foreigners came from Europe, Latin America, Asia; the other African was the Nigerian sociologist, ***.~[* name? ]~ There was a mixture of academic and practical people: politicians, both retired and current, lawyers, historians, scientists, journalists and so on. Among the scholars was the great Australian jurist, Dr. Julius Stone. Geoffrey Hodgson, the writer and observer of British contemporary scene and practices, was also there at the time although I did not see much of him at the Center. The fellow appointed to replace me when I left was Elliot Richardson, the former US Attorney General.

Thus, I began my researches and writing for my book on The Contribution of the Courts to Government: a West African View which was later on published by the Clarendon Press of Oxford University. It was just like keeping regular working hours of research, writing and discussion. In due course, I gave my presentation on what I was doing to my colleagues at the sherry hour. From time to time, the Center arranged lectures or discussion sessions. At one of these, I met Averell Harriman. He asked me, “You are not going to write another book, are you?” That showed what his view of book writing was. He thought too many books were being written. Probably, his concern was over the quality of the contents and I do not blame him for that. But we have got to a stage where academic merit is judged by production of books or papers. While I was at the Center, Dick Wilson, an acknowledged authority on China and the Far East, visited the US and I got him to make a presentation to my colleagues. He spoke of China which was then of topical interest.

I had the opportunity of visiting Ghana once during my stay in Washington. That was when the Academic Committee of the University of Cape Coast invited me to attend one of our meetings. I was not away for very long. But I did not know then, that absences from Washington during a fellow's tenure were regarded as leave of absence. When I received another invitation from David Smith of Harvard Law School to come and stay for three weeks to participate in a seminar, to which Justice Robert Hayfron-Benjamin had also been invited, and to give a few lectures, I found that obtaining permission for this was very heavy going. It was pointed out to me by the Center authorities that I had been away already once. I was, however, allowed to accept the invitation after I had come to realise that it was the last time during my year that I was going to be away from Washington. The whole family went to Harvard where we were put up at the Faculty Club. Stella and I were rather apprehensive in invading this quiet retreat of academic life with three children aged 11, 7 and 5. How could we disturb the repose of the great, the elderly and the erudite people who frequented here? They were really well behaved as children of their ages but, on one occasion, one or all of them took a ride on the wooden rail on the staircase with us protesting in embarrassment, in vain. There was another occasion when they were being difficult in the dining room and we were admonishing them. One elderly gentleman then dining a few tables away got up and walked slowly to us and said, “Please, remember whenever you feel annoyed by your children that an old man once said that they were lovely children.” Stella and I were at once crushed, proud and happy; crushed because we had give an impression that the children were not behaving properly which had been found unacceptable by one of the members of the Club; proud and happy because we were the parents of these children.

The seminar on some aspect of criminal law and procedure went off well. So did my three lectures. One of them was on international law. The great Dr. T. O. Elias, the African lawyer whom all revered, had written an article on international law, aspects of which I did not I agree with. My lecture, therefore, was devoted to a view contrary to what the great Dr. Elias had propounded. The lectures were well attended by both black and white students. But there, at the seminar and at other lectures which I attended as well as in the dining canteen, I noticed that the black students all congregated together and the white students together. I had a couple of meetings with the Dean, Professor Albert Sacks. At one of them, I asked the Dean what kind of students Harvard was producing at that time. He was quite apologetic and commended me on my noticing the division. He explained that during his time as a student in Harvard, when there were only a few black students there, there was complete integration among the students. But now that there was a substantial number of black students, when he would have thought that the total integration would continue, they tended to group together. It probably illustrated the fact that the black students thought that they did not need the white students. The white students, on the other hand, after trying on occasion to mix and finding themselves rejected, had apparently given up and were sticking to their own race. The Dean appeared highly disturbed by the phenomenon and promised to see what he could do to effect a change.

I did have a problem with the black students. They obviously had decided that they were going to be segregated from the whites, with whom they had an apparent disagreement. Being black, the black students naturally expected that I would side with them in this disagreement; they expected me to be with them. But I did not think that the problem of the blacks and their attitudes were mine. It seemed to me to be a particularly American problem and the fact that I was black did not mean that I was going to take part in it. That made them suspicious. I discussed the matter with Tierwul, one of our bright Northern Ghana students from Legon, who was then up at Harvard for his postgraduate degree. He found himself having the same difficulty. It was great to see Tierwul at the time. He promised so much. It is a tragedy that he died so young. The suspicion which the black students must have had of me was unfortunately compounded by the fact that they invited me to give an additional lecture to their club. On that day of all days, I had acute laryngitis and could not speak. I had my disability reported to David Smith who had recommended medication which I took. But I do not think that the black students were convinced of my ailment. What I should have done was to send a copy of a prepared speech, if I had had one, to the organisers with a request that it should be read on my behalf. But I did not have such a prepared speech as I had had for my lectures which I had originally been invited to give. I thought I was going to give a short off-the-cuff talk, followed by a discussion with them. I left Harvard feeling distinctly under a cloud with the black students of the Law School.

This, however, was not the general impression that I left Harvard with. I had discussions with the one black Law Professor on the Faculty at the time, Derryck Bell. I mentioned my plight to him. He did not think there was anything I could do about it. He knew that there were racial tensions in the School. I met other members of the Faculty, including the famous Professor Louis B. Sohn who, at that time, had temporarily bound sets of volumes on his documents on International Law, one of which he presented to me.

The children enjoyed the Cambridge, Massachusetts area. They visited their first large aquarium there. Stella's very good friend, Daily, was living in the area and we visited her and her family.

After we had returned from Harvard to Washington D.C., life followed a predictable pattern. I made my intellectual contribution to the Center by presenting my work there to a Sherry Hour arranged for the purpose. By and large, it went off well although I discovered during question time that most of the interest in my work was concentrated on the contribution of customary tribunals to the governance of African States. That, unfortunately, was not the thrust of my researches. I had been dealing with the contribution of the courts which, as a result of our colonial heritage, had become recognised in post-colonial Africa as the regular and constitutionally accepted courts of the countries. This reception was somewhat disappointing. It seemed to me that my fellow members of the Center were only interested in an African if he was discussing customary institutions and their achievements in the process of governance. I dealt with their enquiries as best as I could. These questions, however, did not affect the direction of my research, which were in the relations between the judicial systems of various systems and the executive and legislative organs of State; how independent courts and their judges were; the mechanisms developed for the protection of that independence, if such exists; the ability or inability of the courts to decide disputes between State powers and the individual impartially. I researched for examples from the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union, China, some former colonial territories of Britain and some francophone African countries. The relations and interactions of the executive, legislature and the judiciary of Ghana since independence were used as a case study. I had got the idea of the case study from Marshall's book on Parliamentary Sovereignty where the learned writer illustrated his theme from a case study of the protracted proceedings for the removal of the coloured voters of South Africa from the common voters' roll.

Ralph duly passed his entrance exam to Achimota and we packed him off to Ghana in time for the school year starting in September 1973. He stayed with the Korsahs who acted in loco parentis. He came back to Washington for his holidays at Christmas. By a freak, Washington had some snow that winter. The city is so unused to snow that whenever any falls, which stays on the ground for any length of time, the affairs of the whole city are dislocated. People stayed at home from work. The city authorities did not have the equipment to remove the snow from the roads to make them passable. Ralph came in time to meet the snow that year, and it was lovely to see him and the girls rolling down slopes in their first snow.

I have already described the delight which I felt from working at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Being in the Washington D.C. area itself was an advantage. I was able to visit the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court of the United States. We had some old friends around. Among the Americans who had once served in Ghana were of course the De Prees, whom I have already mentioned. There were also Jack Foley, Deputy to Franklin Williams at the US Embassy in the 60s and his wife, Barbara, and Moeen Qureshie, the Pakistani aristocrat, and his German wife, Lilo. Moeen, who had been the IMF Representative in Accra about in the middle 60s was a Senior Vice-President at the World Bank. The Matlocks, Jack, later to serve as Ambassador to the Soviet Union and on the U.S. National Security Council during the time of President Nixon, were there. Robert (Bobby) Freeman, who started the Ghana Insurance Company in the 1960s with his friend, Vertner Tandy and became a consultant to the company when taken over by the Ghana Government and redesignated State Insurance Corporation, and his wife, Mary, were now back from their African travels which they undertook after leaving Ghana and were ensconced in the heart of Washington D.C. Stella Davis, who was with the USIS in Accra but was now living within striking distance from Washington, invited us to join the Sloans who lived in a penthouse at Watergate apartments for an evening at the Kennedy Center to listen to Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte. Jill Funk had lost her husband who served in the US Embassy in Ghana. I have mentioned Kwame Kwarteng at the IMF. He and Letitia were hosts to us many times. We were all very proud of Eddie Ayensu, who was then in charge of the Department of Botany at the Smithsonian Institution. For a young Ghanaian to have achieved such high recognition at the Smithsonian was a thing which raised the spirits of all Ghanaians. Dinah Ayensu was then very busy publishing colourful and tasteful books on African cuisine. I have also mentioned Leif and Dagmar Muten who were most helpful to us throughout our stay. Across the street from the Bank was Olav Snellingen, Deputy Legal Counsel at the IMF. It will be recalled that I met both Leif and Olav while I was serving on the UN Committee for Double Taxation Treaties.

It was difficult not to enjoy Washington with these friends around. We saw much of them. They often entertained us. Occasionally, but not often, we managed to return this generosity. I am not very good at sight-seeing or going to museums or undertaking other educational ventures, like visiting exhibitions. I find that after seeing a few of the art pieces at an exhibition, I am overburdened by the weight and magnificence of the whole atmosphere and become listless thereafter. Nevertheless, we also took in a few of the Washington scenes. We visited Wolf Trap Center with the De Prees to listen to a delightful performance of Donizetti's Don Pasquale. By the grace of the last De Pree child's second birthday, I joined the family and the De Prees to Washington Zoo.

The Graysons had, by now, moved to Charlottesville, the home of the University of Virginia. Les was a Professor in the School of Business. We visited and stayed with them on a few weekends. Unbeknown to me, the Graysons started working on friends in the prestigious University of Virginia Law School to invite me to join the Faculty for a semester. I received an unexpected invitation from the Faculty to lunch one day, which I duly accepted. It turned out to be an interview with Peter Low the Associate Dean of the Faculty and one or two of its members. After that, I was invited to join the Faculty from January 1974 for a semester. I knew that it would be extending the leave of absence from the Ghana judiciary and the University Law Faculty which I had obtained but I could not resist it. I accepted.

For the transfer from Washington D.C. to Charlottesville, we hired~[* rented? ]~ a self-drive van and packed our things into it. Bill De Pree, characteristically, offered help. So I drove the U-Haul van with him sitting by me. Just coming into Charlottesville, we had a scary moment when we were descending a hill and as we came to a curve I found that I could not reach the foot-brake to slow down the van. It was frightening. Fortunately, I managed to connect with the foot-brake in the nick of time to save us from going over the edge. It was the sort of moment to be treasured in the memory rather than talked about. People become closer to each other after such an experience. Bill helped us with the unpacking of the many things we had managed to accumulate during the year in Washington.

The Law School had found us accommodation in a very comfortable rambling two-storey house set in woodland of some five acres but still within walking distance from the School. The owners were the Bradbeers. He was a science teacher at the University and by a stroke of fortune, had taken his sabbatical leave and was going, I believe, the University of Leicester to spend at least the year there. Wilma Bradbeer was a well-known potter in town with many fine specimens of her works about the house. We felt uncomfortable at first when she said we could use the items of pottery whenever we felt like it. When we told her about being afraid of breaking anything, she merely laughed and said that she would just replace it by making another one. We became more relaxed after that. They were such sweet people. Clive Bradbeer who was an excellent bread-baker, had welcomed us with a specially baked loaf.

When I joined the Faculty of the Law School of the University of Virginia (UVA), the Dean was John Paulsen. I was given the room of John Norton Moore, the international lawyer. He was then on leave of absence advising the State Department. I had the company of another international lawyer of some distinction, Richard (“Dick) Lillich, on the Faculty. From time to time, he invited me to assess foreign students who had applied to come up to UVA. Students from some countries were made to take entrance exams, as a matter of routine while others were automatically exempted. I was happy to find that the Law Faculty of the University of Ghana was among the second list. I was struck by the distinctly different relationship between black and white students from those that I had observed at Harvard. The students at Charlottesville easily mixed amongst~[* ”between“ replaced ]~ themselves both in classes and social events. This difference intrigued me, especially as Virginia was regarded as a southern State, where segregation was bound to be more distinct. Once, when I had indicated in Legon that I might do research in Virginia, I was strongly advised by John Griffiths, an American lecturing at Legon at the time, whether I could not find some University in the northern part of the US to do the research in. Our black friends, Bobby Freeman, were in Washington D.C. at the time. I mentioned the difference I had noticed to Bobby Freeman and asked him for an explanation. He thought that whites in the northern States in the US were theoretical liberates. They loudly preached liberalism but when it came to the practice of it, they were quite intolerant. The whites of the southern States, on the other hand, had lived with blacks for a long time. They kept them segregated because they thought it was ordained by law. Once they were made to accept that the law did not support segregation, the majority were prepared to mix more with the blacks than was done by the ”liberal" whites in the north. This may have been a simplistic explanation but it, at least, gives a reason for the phenomena that I observed between black and white students at Harvard and at the University of Virginia.

I taught two courses on a comparative basis at Charlottesville. One was on Criminal Procedure and the other was on Constitutions. The Criminal Procedure course compared procedures and protections as developed in England and as modified by current American and Ghanaian practices. The class was most interesting. It had a number of mature students from both American and foreign backgrounds. Among the Americans, one was a former New York policeman; another was a lady who had been a judge in Vietnam. Among the foreigners were an Austrian, an Australian and two New Zealanders. There were also a few younger. But the blend of maturity with youth of different backgrounds and experiences meant that I merely had to mention a subject to invite a wealth of different viewpoints and practices. It was fun because I learnt as much from them as they did from me. There was an easy informality and friendship between teacher and students. We invited them to our home as one did in Legon. But we were surprised when invitations started to come from them to have dinner with them in their homes. The class on comparative constitutions was a larger and more even class of young students. I enjoyed that also but not as much as the class on Criminal Procedure. The contrast between UVA courses and courses that I taught at Legon was that while the Virginia courses evoked more pre-lecture reading and discussions at the lectures, the Legon courses involved more spoon-feeding. I tried introducing the American system on my return to Ghana but did not get very far. Whether the students read the material I gave them beforehand or not, I never really knew. They were not forthcoming with opinions or responses which showed that they had profited from the reading. The classes invariably run dry in a matter of minutes. Eventually, I gave up and reverted to the system of instruction which they all preferred.

While I taught, I continued my research on the contribution of the courts to government. Of course the Law School library had abundant material on the American perspective, which I took advantage of. We also learnt about the area of Virginia where we lived. The influence and fame of Jefferson hung heavily around everything. He had founded the University. His learning must have been simply profound. We visited his home in Monticello and were intrigued by the practices of his age, such as sitting up in bed to sleep. One could not stretch full-length on the beds.

We saw a great deal of the Graysons during our stay in Charlottesville. It was always a delight to see their daughters, Carol, whom we named Madonna, and Judy, who was Joodles to us. We had lunches together, visited each other for dinners, whether alone or to parties. They introduced us to friends and we went to concerts together. Charlottesville seemed to be an oasis of culture. There, we discovered the renowned Austrian pianist, Alfred Brendel, and the Hungarian couple, Goerg Pauk and Frankel. I remember that, after the Pauk and Frankel concert we attended a party with the performers to which the Graysons invited us. They were then less known musicians and it later gave us a feeling of contributing to their discovery as great performers. Pauk and Frankel played a Beethoven sonata which I, forever after, associated with them.

The semester soon passed. We attended the graduation ceremony which followed. Thus, we ended our stay in the United States with the end of the semester at the University of Virginia Law School on May 30, 1994. Then we started on our way back to Ghana through Finland. Kwamena Otoo was then Ambassador to West Germany and I thought I could get him to buy an export model car for me. He advised that cars were cheaper in Belgium and he would ask Jack Wilmot, the Ambassador there, to help. So I arranged with Jack to organise that Stella, the girls and myself would pick up the car in Brussels and drive on to Finland for a holiday. I had given ample time for the car to be ready to proceed by the time we got to Brussels. I had sent the money for it which he had duly paid over to Toyota months before the end of our stay in the US and we had been assured by the company that the car would be ready for our collection on arrival in Brussels. When we got to Brussels, Jack gave me the news that the car, a Toyota Crown, had been ordered and paid for but the Toyota agency had told him that the car was on the high seas and would not be getting to Brussels the following day and ready for collection the day after that. Meanwhile, Jack himself was travelling on business away from Brussels that evening. This was all very upsetting but Harriet, his wife, made us welcome and put us up for the couple of days. As my original intention was to collect the car and move on immediately, I wondered what unexpected cost I would have been put to if the Wilmots had not offered us hospitality. On the second day, we were told that the car was still on the high seas but would be arriving the following day. When, on that day, we were told that the car had not arrived but would take a few days, I became really desperate. The agency manager then made us a proposition. He had a Toyota Crown which had been used as a demonstration car for interested persons. It was still new but if I was interested he could give it to me at ten per cent rebate. At that time, I was furious but I would have taken anything just to move on. So I agreed to take it and we were off within a few hours.

Our holiday in Finland was the usual relaxed and enjoyable affair. I was feeling a bit guilty because I had stayed away longer than the original one year granted me. I was therefore anxious to get back to Accra. I arranged, therefore, to start for Ghana by the end of June, leaving Stella and the girls to continue on their holidays. I would on my way back meet Ralph who was coming to join them in Finland in London, see him off and then get back to the continent to have the car shipped to Accra from Rotterdam, then fly to Accra. That arrangement was more successfully implemented. I met Ralph in London; we stayed with Dick and Sally Wilson overnight; then I saw Ralph off to Finland and drove the car to Rotterdam according to plan.

We planned a holiday in Finland. But as I had extended my stay in the US already by five months, I thought my holiday would be short, however much longer Stella and the girls~[* “children” replaced ]~ intended to stay in Finland. Jack Wilmot was in charge at the Ghana Mission in Brussels, and as advised by Kwamena Otoo, then Ambassador in Bonn, that the best place for the purchase of duty free cars in Europe was Brussels I had asked him to order and pay for a Toyota Corolla for my collection in Brussels. Stella, the girls and I would then drive to Finland.~[* paragraph repeated, around 582 - 583 numbers have changed, with new heading ]~

We arrived to find Jack Wilmot on his way on some mission somewhere else and to hear the news that the car was still on the high seas, although the company promised that it would be in a couple of days. So we were welcome to stay at the residence with his wife, Ewura Esie, until the car arrived. This totally upset our calculations. But we were grateful to Jack for inviting us to stay at his residence. The two days passed with Toyota still saying that the car was on the high seas. Where, they either did not know or were reluctant to tell. They offered us other cars in their showroom. But none of them was large enough to take a family of four moving with luggage back home after a year and a half stay abroad. In desperation we came to an agreement to take a Toyota Crown, a larger car than I had bargained for which was used by their directors as advertisement for something short of the money I had deposited. We were happy to be on our way in Europe at last, driving through Germany, Denmark, Sweden to Finland. I stayed in Finland for about a couple of weeks, still conscience-stricken at my having overstayed my intended one year abroad, and started on my way back, this time driving alone through Hamburg, where I arranged for the shipment of the car from Rotterdam, and London, where I picked up Ralph on holiday after his first year in Achimota and to put him on a flight for Finland to join Stella and the girls, deposited the car in Rotterdam, and flew back to Ghana.~[* (paragraph) repetition with a few additional tidbits, see around 582 - 583 numbers have changed, with new heading ]~

While I was away, Dr. Ekow Daniels had been elected Dean of the Law Faculty. Some of my friends at the Faculty spoke as if I had been stabbed in the back by certain other of my colleagues. But whether this was so or not, I never bothered to find out the details. As a result, I never knew who had said what against me at any meeting leading to the election or of the actual election of Ekow Daniels as the new Dean. I knew the terms on which I had accepted to be seconded to the Faculty. That was to hold the place until one of the permanent Faculty lecturers had gained sufficient stature to be appointed Dean. The candidate favoured by Alex Kwapong, the Vice-Chancellor, was George Ofosu-Amaah. But as I have explained in an earlier Chapter, this was not to be until much later. His acceptance of the appointment as head of Special Branch in Busia's government, changed the course of this simple academic plan. I recall attending a party in London given by John Thompson,~[* repetition (from here till end of paragraph) almost verbatim from an earlier chapter ]~ at which I met quite a number of officers of MI5 who had previously served in the British High Commission in Ghana. Some of the invitees were obviously embarrassed to see me there because they had behaved while in Accra as if they were ordinary diplomats. One of them always gave the story that he was only a temporary cadet in the British diplomatic service wanting to get a permanent appointment, but each time he sat an examination or was given an interview, which coincided with the periods when he had to visit London, he failed. Being a very nice person, this story generated a lot of sympathy. John Thompson, on the other hand did not take it amiss that I was there, because he thought in my position as Director of Public Prosecutions, I had known who all these people really were. I remember that when his other guests were leaving, he asked me to stay behind for a while. At that time we started discussing his guests and I mentioned the story of the one guest who passed himself off as a temporary cadet of the diplomatic course. John laughed and said he thought I knew all the time that that fellow was one of them. But the point of mentioning this story was that among John Thomson's guests that evening was a Deputy Director of MI5 who talked to me about Ghana. He knew George Ofosu-Amaah, and he knew he had been seconded from the Law Faculty, so he asked me whether I thought George would come back to the Faculty, and when I answered that the Prime Minister obviously wanted him to stay on as long as possible, he replied, “I don't think he would like to come back. He is enjoying himself too much catching Russian spies.” This was a reference to a recent expulsion of some Soviet diplomats from Ghana for spying. But George's tenure at Special Branch was involuntarily terminated by the 1972 coup, and after the usual unpleasant detention for a period went abroad and lectured in, among other places, the University of Kent at Canterbury, where the former Dean at Legon, Brian Simpson, was then a professor. He eventually, succeeded to the Deanship of the Legon Law Faculty after Ekow Daniels and other temporary holders.

In my case, after my return from the United States, I decided that there was no more point in my continuing a secondment to the Faculty away from the Bench. I, therefore, joined my brothers on the Court of Appeal on a full time basis. I still continued to lecture at the Law Faculty of the University, where I held the title of Professor but I reverted to the part-time lecturing which I had done before my secondment in 1969.

Ghana was still under a military regime when we returned from the United States. It will be recalled that Acheampong, who overthrew the Busia administration in 1972, began with a government which appeared to want to practise economy and modesty in practices they adopted. They were reputed to have used smaller cars rather than the huge gas-guzzlers which members of governments enjoyed displaying as conspicuous symbols of their power and importance. But, by the time we returned, this apparent modesty had been pushed aside. Already, there were complaints about corruption and cronyism in high places. Cocoa, the main export crop on which Ghana depended for its foreign exchange earnings, was not doing well at all. Not only was the world price of the product in decline, but the train set by Busia in expelling the alien African workers, which had adversely affected the production of cocoa seriously, continued. With the value of the cedi declining in real terms, though Government stuck to a fixed exchange rate, which had no realistic relation to its real value, for it, there was an thriving black market for hard currencies. Cocoa was reputedly smuggled to Ghana's neighbour, Cote d'Ivoire, which was within the CFA franc zone and therefore had a currency which was considered hard in comparison. Some of the cocoa smuggling was said to be going through Ghana's eastern neighbour, Togo, which, unlike Cote d'Ivoire, did not itself grow any significant amount of cocoa or legally import any but, nevertheless, had a sizeable cocoa export industry. It was during this period when on a visit by Leif Muten on one of the IMF Missions he paid a visit to Amon Nikoi, then the Governor of the Bank of Ghana, with me in tow. After the visit, Amon, in seeing us off, came down from his office and invited us to come to visit the “opposition” to the Bank's exchange control administration. To our surprise, he took us across the road from the Bank building and there pointed at the array of African art dealers sitting by the roadside hawking their wares and said with a chuckle, “Gentlemen, here is the opposition.” No one paid any attention to us other than to offer us some of their artefacts as exorbitant prices. But there was no doubt that if we had wanted a deal in other currencies, we could have got it. This, of course, was a depressing turn of events. If Busia's regime did not much improve the economic situation which was one of the main reasons why the Nkrumah regime was toppled, it was clear that Acheampong's reign was not in a position to make any difference.

My secondment to the Law Faculty in 1969 was approved by Chief Justice Akufo Addo. Under the 1969 Constitution which brought Busia to power, he became the President of Ghana. The Constitution created a new Supreme Court, as Akuffo Addo had always wanted. E.A.L. Bannnerman who had acted as a Crown Counsel in the days when Gold Coast nationals were kept as far as possible out of the Attorney General's Department, and a Magistrate in Ghana, and later High Court judge and had returned to teach at the Ghana Law School, succeeded Akuffo Addo as Chief Justice. Azu Crabbe and Apaloo were elevated to this Court. Charlie Crabbe and Patrick Anin were appointed to it. But when the coup of 1972 took place, the Supreme Court was first suspended and then later abolished once more, and the judges of the Court were made to revert to their previous appointments. Azu Crabbe in due course succeeded Bannerman as the Chief Justice.~[* repetition (beginning of paragraph) check ]~ The Court I rejoined on a full time basis was headed by Azu Crabbe, with Apaloo and George Lassey as my seniors. Other members of the Court were Annie Jiagge, E.N.P. Sowah, Philip Archer, Kingsley Nyinah, Dan Annan, Robert Hayfron-Benjamin and George Francois. Chief Justice Bannerman, a good lawyer but one not very popular, had been associated with the Busia regime. His tenure was brought to an end with the suspension and subsequent abolition of the Supreme Court. With the judges of the Supreme Court being required by the Military Regime to revert to their former positions, Chief Justice Bannerman, who had come to his office from private life, via the Law School, went back to private life.

I was still Chairman of the Law Reform Commission. But I did not last very long in that position. Fred Apaloo's term as Chairman of the Council of Law Reporting came to an end some time after my return. Chief Justice Azu Crabbe, with whom Fred's relations had become somewhat strained and who, under the law had the right, by virtue of his office, to nominate the Chairman, did not feel inclined to re-nominate him and nominated me instead. I have often wondered whether part of Azu's design in my nomination as Fred's replacement was to drive a wedge between Fred, with whom I was very close, and myself. I was quite irritated by the nomination because, Azu never spoke to me about it and my becoming the Chairman of the Council gave Dr. S. K. B. Asante, then Solicitor General, or Deputy Attorney General, I forget which, the excuse to propose a new Chairman of the Law Reform Commission, a job I enjoyed immensely and in which I thought I was making a useful contribution. On that account, I even suggested to Asante that I would not mind continuing to serve on the Commission as an ordinary member. But I understood that Justice Archer, who was my successor, felt that my continued presence on the Commission would be an embarrassment to him as he was junior to me on the bench. Thus, suddenly, ended my association with the Commission.~[* a suggestion given to move ended to end of sentence ]~ One person was quite happy at my return to the Council of Law Reporting: that was my friend Kofi Tetteh, who was the Editor of the Law Reports.

Kutlu Fuad, the Director of the Legal Division of the Commonwealth Secretariat phoned soon after my return to Ghana to invite me to join a Committee to be appointed by the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth to enquire into the forms of legal co-operation between Commonwealth countries. Kutlu had met me during the period when I served as an Executive Member of the Committee of the Commonwealth Legal Education Association. His father was Judge Fuad, who had served on the High Court Bench in the Gold Coast before independence. The chairman of the Committee was Sir Roy Marshall, the legal educationalist who had, in my time as a student, edited Nathan's Equity Through the Cases, and later became Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sheffield. The third member was Professor John Ll. Edwards, who wrote extensively on Criminal Law, but whose masterpiece was The Law Officers of the Crown. That book gave a comprehensive picture of the different kinds of Attorneys-General in Commonwealth countries, ranging from the civil servant to the politically appointed officer and the roles each played under their respective constitutions. We met in London, where we deliberated and held interviews, several times. But it was clear, and that position was irksome to us, that the legal co-operation in the Commonwealth was wholly Anglocentric and we were inclined to recommend some diversification of centres of activity. So on one occasion, at the instance of John Edwards, who was then teaching in Toronto, we had a meeting in Canada. Apart from recommending diversification of activities, we also thought that the work of the Legal Advisory Service of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, to a large extent, duplicated services provided to Commonwealth governments by the Legal Division of the Commonwealth Secretariat. We recommended, therefore, that the Legal Advisory Service of the Institute should be abolished. That recommendation did not sit very well with the Institute and it refused to implement it. An interesting piece of evidence given by the Director of the Advisory Service which stuck in my mind was in connection with his telling us what the Service did. Among the services that the Director stated were sometimes required was advice from some Attorneys-General of Commonwealth countries on what to do when a coup d'etat occurred. The picture of an Attorney-General asking, and a public service in London giving, in advance advice on the types of legislation he should have passed to strengthen the position of the insurgents seemed quite odd to us.~[* repetition from underlined section ]~

[CHECK] I also was appointed a Sole Commissioner to enquire into a shooting incident on the Dodowa Road, just about the University entrance facing the Police Station. The student shot was not a Ghanaian but a Sudanese. He died as a result of his wounds. The students, as was often the case, were demonstrating because of conditions which they found unacceptable. They had indicated that they were going to hold this demonstration and had been told by the University authorities after some negotiations, to hold it within the campus and not to go outside. Without warning, they came out of the campus on the main road and were marching towards Accra. In panic, the Police were called in. Those at the Legon Police Station were not in a position to deal with serious rioting, so they summoned the flying squad who came on the scene and confronted the students. The Police say that they fired some warning shots in the air. Somehow, a shot hit this Sudanese student who had nothing to do with the demonstration but was returning from Accra after a visit. If the Police story was correct, then they could not have hit this student. However, they maintained their story that the only firing that they did was into the air. Nobody else was found in the vicinity with any guns. The bullet which hit the deceased was a usual Police issue ammunition. There had also been allegations of Police brutality against students when the Police drove the students into the campus and allegedly beat up some of them, including female students, severely. My commission was to find out the circumstances in which the student came to be killed and to make recommendations. It goes without saying that my finding was against the Police. My recommendations, apart from those which were made in respect of University administration, were mainly that the Police should as far as possible, stay out of the campus and allow the University authorities to deal with their own problems within the campus. But in cases of emergency, where they are invited in, they should come in sufficient force so that their mere presence without using any weapons should be sufficient to deter over-enthusiastic or over-excited students from carrying out any acts of vandalism or bodily harm. With Ernest Arku, the Head of the Police as part of the Government ruling the country, my criticism of his Force or Service, however one chose to describe it, did not enhance my popularity with the Police. He had, in fact, already branded me, before his colleagues, as a person bent on creating disorder in the country because of the proposal which the Law Reform Commission, of which I was then Chairman, had put forward in the new draft Evidence Code in order to counteract the Police's improper inducements to persons in custody, that confessions made to the Police should not be admissible in evidence without their confirmation before a judicial officer.

The Law Reports show that the first reportable case that I gave judgment was in Republic v. Director of Prisons; ex parte Allotey and Another on December 10 1974; a case in which I presided over a full Court of Appeal consisting of myself, Justices Jiagge, Archer, Kingsley-Nyinah and Francois. It was an application for a review of a decision of the ordinary bench of the Court confirming a judgment of the High Court and the Circuit Court that the applicants be returned to the United States for trial on a charge of fraud by false pretences of an Equitorial Guinea company to the tune of over a million US dollars. I wrote the judgment dismissing the application.

I continued with my ordinary judicial duties with the part-time lecturing on the side. In 1975, I was invited by the Government of Australia to participate in the ceremonies of the Law Conference being held in Canberra. The invitation was extended to me by David Evans, the Australian High Commissioner with whom we were friendly, as indeed we had been with Australian High Commissioners since the days of B. C. B. Ballard. His wife, Pam, was also a great friend. Besides the participation in the Canberra Law Conference, a tour of Australian State capitals to Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide was arranged for me. I was accompanied at this conference and on the following tour by a distinguished judge from India, Mr. Justice Khanna. He was an older, more dignified and reserved judge than me. He had just about then become the hero of the traditionalists who believed that the Chief Justice of India must be the most senior judge of the Supreme Court when the post becomes vacant. Mrs. Gandhi, the Prime Minister, had thought otherwise and had appointed a judge junior to Justice Khanna when a vacancy occurred in the Chief Justice's position and Justice Khanna, as the most senior judge was superseded. Later on, he was to write some of the most brilliant constitutional judgments of their Court. But, on this Australian visit, I had the honour of being chosen by the conference organisers to make the speech on behalf of the foreign guests at the dinner. The other speaker was Sir Ninian Stephen, then a judge of the Australian High Court, but later to become the Governor-General. Sir Ninian and I became friends thereafter and we kept up a long correspondence for several years, only to be interrupted at the time that we were relocated to London, when I thought I was giving him too much trouble while so burdened with the duties of his office in continuing an exchange of correspondence with me.

At the time of my 1975 Australian visit, the Governor-General was Sir John Kerr, whom I had met ten years earlier when I was in Australia for the Commonwealth Law Conference. He was also at the dinner at which I spoke but was led away a bit inebriate after the dinner. Sir John Kerr was gracious also to include me in a group of about ten guests for luncheon during that week. I was asked to lead Lady Kerr to the table and I nearly made a fool of myself by reminding her that we had met ten years before. But something told me not to bring up that reminder of the past. I later learnt that she was a new wife.

The Prime Minister was Mr. Gough Whitlam, the Labour leader, who threw a cocktail party for the judges and lawyers participating in the Law Conference and other guests. There must have been at least five hundred guests. So I was happily surprised during the course of the evening when one of his aides approached me and said that the Prime Minister wanted to talk to me and I was led to where he was. People around him quietly withdrew a distance and he gave me what I considered to be a great deal of his time. Fifteen minutes? But then one's mind exaggerates the time frame of such interviews afterwards. He showed a remarkable grasp of knowledge of affairs of Ghana and other Commonwealth African countries. We were deeply engrossed in this discussion when we were interrupted by his Attorney-General, Mr. Enderby, saying that he had an urgent matter to discuss with the Prime Minister. As Mr. Whitlam was dismissed from office in controversial circumstances shortly after that by Governor-General Kerr, I thought that Enderby's urgent matter, on that occasion must have been connected with the political crisis which was already looming at that stage. I understood that the constitutionality of the dismissal was advised on by Sir Garfield Barwick, whom I had also met when I attended the Commonwealth Law Conference in Sydney ten years before and who later on visited Ghana. Sir Garfield had been an Attorney-General of the Commonwealth of Australia before but was then Chief Justice. Over a couple of decades later, I read in David Leigh's book on The Wilson Plot that Prime Minister Whitlam's dismissal was engineered by the CIA with the assistance of British intelligence because, in August 1974, he had fulfilled an election pledge setting up a Commission of Inquiry under Justice Hope into the Intelligence services of Australia, a move which the writer thought had caused chills among British Intelligence men. He had replaced the heads of the Australian Intelligence services, ASIO and ASIS, with whom British Intelligence services had co-operated. After the change in the headship of the Intelligence services, he threatened not to renew the lease of Pine Gap, allegedly the CIA's most important satellite base. Of course, I am not in the position to judge this allegation. But whatever be the reason for his removal, I was sorry to see Gough Whitlam deprived of office in that summary manner. After all, apart from a natural sympathy for his Party and the obvious interest in African development and progress, no foreign Prime Minister had paid me such undivided attention before. Nor was it likely to happen again.

I remember that when we were leaving the Prime Minister's cocktail party, I was approached by the controversial Justice Lionel Murphy of the Australian High Court. He was with a couple of young ladies and he kindly invited me to come with them to a night club. I had some other engagement and declined. He was controversial because he was known to have strong Labour views and must have expressed that inclination in his judgments. His conduct as a lawyer and a judge may also have appeared scandal prone. But nobody said that he was an incompetent judge.

I enjoyed the conference in Canberra very much. Apart from Sir Ninian Stephen and Justice Murhpy, I met the other judges of the High Court, including the longest serving judge who was first appointed in the 1930s, Justice McTiernan, who was acting as Chief Justice at the time in the absence of Sir Garfield Barwick, Justices Mason, later a Chief Justice, and Lloyd. The Australians had a delightful system of allocating foreign guests to their conferences to individual judges or lawyers to host. I was fortunate to have been chosen on this visit by Justice and Mrs. Fox, who had been my hosts when I visited Australia in 1965. It was fun visiting people who had been so kind to me before, once again. Mrs. Fox, who loved embroidering, marked her dinners with foreign guests by making them leave their signatures on the table cloth. She embroidered the signatures onto the table cloth later. At the dinner of 1975, she produced the table-cloth which had my signature and those of the other guests then on beautifully embroidered for permanence. We spent some time recalling the other guests. It was a nostalgic evening.

While in Canberra, I was flown up the mountains to a nearby sheep farm at Tumut. In Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, I went round legal education and continuing legal education institutions. I also met Justice Kirby who was then the Chairman of the Australian Law Reform Commission. There I also found my old friends, Jim and Virginia De Friest. The last time I had seen them was in 1965, after I had returned from my first visit to Australia and the United States. The De Friests were then living in Ghana, with Jim working with Mobil Oil. It would be recalled that Virginia had, without my knowledge, written to her parents, the Quinbys in San Francisco, so that I was surprised to be welcomed to the city when I arrived at the Airport by an invitation from her lawyer father to get in touch and to visit them at their home in Palo Alto. Now, Jim had finished with Mobil and was working with some company, I believe producing glass, in Melbourne. They had decided that they were going to retire and continue living in Australia, which they found more congenial than the United States. Jim died in 1995; Quig's~[* ? check ]~ mother, Catherine, turned 100 in 1996

I next went to Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, where I found the tutor of my Oxford College, Arthur Rogerson, who had succeeded Ian Evans and had informed me of my finals (Schools) results, installed as a Professor.

I returned to Ghana after some three weeks in Australia and was immediately summoned to the Chief Justice's Chambers. Chief Justice Crabbe asked me to sit in the High Court to dispose of a murder case which had come up doing my absence and he would like me to preside over it. I had not heard of the case of The State v. L. Ohene-Djan and Adu Yeboa before. I was to live with it and its consequences for a long time afterwards. The principal accused in the case, Dr. I. L. Ohene-Djan, was a lawyer. He was from Brong-Ahafo and was in practice there. I had never had anything to do with him, except that during my early years in the Attorney General's Office, papers had passed over my desk to consider whether he was doing anything which compromised his relative, Mr. Yeboah Afari, the then Minister of Health, in whose office he had worked while a student abroad on holiday in Ghana. No prosecution followed this review of the papers. Ohene-Djan had returned to continue his studies and had returned later as a qualified lawyer with a doctorate degree. That was now some fifteen or so years ago. I accepted to do the case.

The trial was, as usual with murder cases, conducted with a jury. The case which the prosecution presented was one of a homicide, the deceased being an unknown man who had tried to burgle the home of Ohene-Djan at night. The deceased was caught and beaten up. He was then tied up and dragged over the rough untarred road with his head on the road by a number of the townspeople over a long distance. Most of the persons involved were not identified at the trial. But the deceased had died in the course of this action. In my book, Criminal Procedure in Ghana, I describe the case as one of the most controversial trials of its time. After the case had proceeded against the accused persons upon their plea of not guilty until the prosecution had closed its case, an application was made by counsel for Ohene-Djan to change his plea to one of not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter. Johnny Quashie-Idun represented Ohene-Djan; and Gyeke-Dako, the Director of Public Prosecutions, led Afreh, then a Chief State Counsel and others, for the prosecution. Upon the application to change the plea, Gyeke-Dako sought an adjournment to consult the Attorney-General and upon the next hearing date, informed the court that the course the defence proposed to take was acceptable to the prosecution. The plea of guilty of manslaughter but not guilty of murder was recorded against him and he was accordingly found guilty of manslaughter while being discharged of the offence of murder. Subsequently, his co-accused who had given evidence on his own behalf, decided to follow the course taken by Ohene-Djan and changed his plea. Gyeke-Dako said that his instructions to accept the plea to manslaughter covered not only Ohene-Djan but Adu Yeboa as well. Adu Yeboa's plea having been accepted, he was convicted upon this changed plea. I also withdrew the case against Ohene-Djan from the jury and convicted him on his plea of guilty of manslaughter. The result of this conviction of Ohene-Djan for manslaughter led to an uproar.

The issue debated by lawyers was technical. It was whether it was legally possible for an accused person, who had been arraigned before a court, to afterwards change his plea of not guilty to that of guilty of a lesser offence. There was a section of the Criminal Procedure Code, section 239(3) which provided that upon arraignment the accused person could plead not guilty of the crime of which he was charged but guilty of a lesser offence. The argument against the trial court's conduct of the case was that an accused was permitted to take advantage of this position only “upon arraignment”, that arraignment consisted of three parts, namely, calling the accused person to the dock by name, reading to him the substance of the charge, and asking him whether he was guilty of the charge or not. After the accused has gone through this exercise at the commencement of the trial, it was no more possible to take advantage of the section and plead guilty to a lesser charge. In other words, the section opening with the words, “when an accused is arraigned on an indictment ...” meant at the exact point in time when he was called upon to plead at the commencement of the trial and not descriptive of the situation when an accused has been brought before a court for trial by arraignment. As I said, the argument was technical. All through my life as a prosecutor, pleas of guilty of a lesser offence made not only at the opening of the trial but during its course as well had been accepted by me and by other prosecutors in the Attorney-General's Office without complaint by anyone. I, myself, found the argument specious and I set out my reasons why in the book I earlier referred to. I did not know what I was supposed to do in a case prosecuted by the Director of Public Prosecutions himself, who had asked for an adjournment to consult the Attorney General about the acceptance of a plea to manslaughter and had come back with the news that the plea was acceptable to the highest legal adviser to the Government. Apparently, I was supposed to have acted like an English judge who, in an obvious case where a private practitioner had accepted a plea for a lesser offence, had refused to accept the plea and had asked the counsel to proceed on the original charge. I did not feel that the cases were identical.

The technical legal argument, however, hid the real purpose behind the criticism of the trial. That soon emerged in full force. The daily newspapers, the Daily Graphic and the Ghanaian Times, especially the latter, from the latter part of August and throughout September of 1975, carried editorials, comments and letters on the case. A number of the public comments were based on the erroneous impression that the accused persons were charged with conspiracy as well as murder. There was no conspiracy charge. Apparently, some of the papers had before the trial, unbeknown to myself, as I was away on my visit to Australia, given publicity to the fact that this was a ritual murder. That the object of the murder was to obtain parts of the deceased body, especially the tongue and other parts of the head, for purposes of juju in order to enable Ohene Djan supplant Acheampong as the Head of State. That I was told was the explanation, for people like Joe Appiah who was then an adviser to Acheampong, but who was not known as an academic or writer on the Criminal Law or Procedure, to engage in articles in the newspapers vilifying the Director of Public Prosecutions and myself. The allegation was based on some story that when the deceased was found, certain parts of his body, especially the head, had been removed; the assumption being that these missing parts had been used in the preparation of the juju. There was no evidence of this whatsoever throughout the trial. The evidence by the Specialist Pathologist, Dr. Edward (Teddy) Christian, whom both counsel and myself closely questioned, was that part of the jaw of the deceased had broken off, but that this was most probably due to the fact that he had been dragged head down over quite a long distance of rough road, as the eye-witness evidence disclosed. Nobody challenged this evidence. Some of the criticism of both judge and prosecutor attributed the outcome of the case to their desire to protect a member of their profession. These criticisms were voiced on the average once every other day for some six weeks.

All this was painful enough. But the cruellest cut of all was when my own Chief Justice Azu Crabbe, who had asked me to do the case, went public in an address to Ghana Bar Association to say that, in his opinion, the conduct of the case was wrong but that he did not think that I was motivated by corruption. The mere mention of corruption in connection with a case I had done was, I thought, an insult. I heard the news that Saturday just before lunch from a telephone call from the journalists who had been present when the Chief Justice made this profound statement asking me whether I had anything to say in reply. I said I had nothing to say. But inwardly, I was furious. However exalted the Chief Justice was, he was not an appellate Court above any judge of the High Court. He had no right or jurisdiction to officially pronounce any judgment delivered by a High Court judge as wrong. I then wondered what was his interest in making that statement. Soon after the phone call from the journalists, my cousin, Lebrecht Chinery-Hesse, the Chief Legal Draftsman phoned, offering some comfort by saying that Azu had made this unfortunate statement, and that I should not pay any attention to him; Azu was often impetuous like that.

From that day, I ceased all social contact with him. I recall that he enjoyed throwing parties in his official capacity to which he invited all his colleagues. I never attended one after that date.

I was avenged by the Bar on my birthday that year, which happened to have coincided with the Opening of the Legal Year. Kwesi Zwennes was the representative of the Bar who spoke on its behalf in reply to the speech in Court of the Chief Justice. Kwesi delivered a rebuke to the Chief Justice of such quality for his criticism of me as I myself could never have done. The terms of the Chief Justice's public intervention appear from the wording of Kwesi Zwennes's riposte. Kwesi's rebuke was so elegantly and allusively phrased that I ought to be pardoned for quoting relevant passages extensively. His words were:

“When, however, the public criticises judicial decisions, as they are entitled to do, they tread on less certain ground because, more often than not, some amount of legal expertise is required of the critic. Even Counsel who appear in the Court of Appeal do not always find it easy to falsify legal reasoning contained in court decisions. We have an ancient saying among our profession that 'The law is buried in the breast of the judge' and this to the effect that what a judge says or does in judgment remains the law for all until he is reversed either by a duly constituted appellate court or by legislation. A judge, my Lords, in the firm view of the Bar, owes no duty to the public to answer for his judgment. Nor, can his brother judge, from whom he may freely dissent on a matter of law or fact, defend or decry his judicial conduct or assessments of cases on the public stage. Often has it been said, my Lords, that a judge has no political platform, for otherwise he ceases to be a judge and assumes the mantle of a politician. The duty to answer public criticism of judicial decisions is therefore firmly left in the hands of the political Minister responsible for Justice if, after weighing a situation by his own political judgment, he should think a public explanation politically expedient or desirable. Nor, my Lords, can it ever be said by any critic finally and authoritatively that a judicial decision of a court is in error on a matter of law or fact, except it be by a duly constituted higher appellate court. To hold otherwise, except by legislation, would in the view of the Bar invite disorder and a want of public confidence in the administration of justice. It may be, my Lords, that in this rule we are less fortunate than the ancient Romans whose jurisprudence recognised the institution of the 'Jurisprudentes', or 'Jurisconsulti', a body of men of acclaimed learning in the law whose considered pronouncements of opinion on matters of law, without more, acquired instant judicial authority! In our own peculiar situation, out-of-court pronouncements by our jurists, however eminent or learned they may be, have no authority as a substitute for the opinion of a duly constituted Court of Appeal, even though we may be inclined to treat such opinion with more than ordinary respect. It is for these reasons, and more, and out of our duty of respect and accustomed courtesy to our superior courts, that the Ghana Bar Association has been constrained into silence on the public debate that has surrounded one of our more recent trials in Ghana.”

As the Chief Justice, in his public analysis of the case, had criticised not only my handling of it but had also criticised Counsel for Lawyer Ohene-Djan, led by Johnny Quashie-Idun, for putting forward the accused person's offer to plead guilty, not of the murder charged but of manslaughter, after the conclusion of the prosecution case, Kwesi Zwennes then turned to justify the conduct of defence Counsel. He said:

"The conduct of Counsel has also been called into question in recent times from unexpected quarters and for even more unexpected reasons! The Ghana Bar, unanimously, is of the view that from time immemorial, the duties of Counsel engaged in the conduct of a case included the first and primary duty to represent his client's case as fully, fearlessly and diligently as his abilities permit; withholding nothing he honestly believes will advance his client's case and submitting to nothing that will unfairly compromise it.

The advocate is not permitted by the ethics of his profession to choose who his client shall be, but must avail all and sundry of his service who may wish to employ him. This Counsel's duty to uphold his client's case fully is owed to the public at large and the individual client, however unpopular the cause or ill-fated the client. It is now said that this duty of Counsel is, 'circumscribed by legal, ethical and moral considerations.'"

Kwesi Zwennes then went on to cite pronouncements by Baron Bramwell in Johnson v. Emerson (1871) L.R. 6 Exch. 329 at page 367, by Lord Halsbury in an article in the Law Quarterly Review (1890, 15 L.Q.R 265, and by Wilkes J. in Ferguson v. Moore 39 S.W. 314 in the Supreme Court of Tennessee, in support of his proposition. Then he continued:

“... Apart, my Lords, from the correlative duty of counsel not to mislead the Court by fraud, deceit or active concealment, we of the Ghana Bar know of no legal rule, ancient or modern, which itself restrains a lawyer from advancing for the consideration of a Court legal argument which Counsel honestly believes to be in his client's favour. We know of no rule of ethics or morals diminishing this valiant duty. On the contrary, we are certain that that duty is enjoined upon us even more forcibly by ethics, for a lawyer who is not bound to advance argument he may conceive to be in his client's favour, is thereby licensed to bargain away his client's rights at will, for fear or greed to satisfy his own selfish ends. In the view of the Bar Association and as a universal rule, if a lawyer honestly believes, however erroneously, that a legal rule, provision or section of the law favours his client he commits an unpardonable dereliction of duty if he fails to advance it for the consideration of the court. It will put Counsel in an intolerable position, if he should be called upon to rehearse his client's case to himself beforehand, as judge, jury, and advocate! A court sitting in adjudication of a case, has an overwhelming discretion and is entitled to reject an ill-conceived, insolent or contemptuous~[* CHECK ”contemnous" replaced ]~ application of counsel in fitting terms of rebuke.

It is again said that counsel's argument may, in an instance, embarrass the court. With the greatest respect, that concept is somewhat difficult to grasp! For, in our common experience at the Bar, it is often undoubtedly counsel who, by taking up an uneasy position in argument, embarrasses himself. Again, in the insistent view of the Ghana Bar, it cannot be said, justly and fairly, that an application or argument advanced by counsel before a court, scrutinised and acceded to by the highest legal officer of the state and granted by a judge who, for his legal learning, impartiality and integrity, has earned the unwavering respect of the whole of the legal profession, is either frivolous, vexatious, or unethical."

That was on 3 October 1975. I thought Kwesi's speech was the best birthday present I could ever have. It was brilliant and I felt most grateful to him. Sitting on the side of Chief Justice Azu Crabbe, I had a feeling that he must have felt himself appropriately chastised.

I do not know whether it was coincidental. But from now on I began thinking more and more of retiring from the Bench. I was now one of the most senior judges on the Bench in Ghana. Apart from the Chief Justice, the only judges who were senior to me were Justices Apaloo and Lassey. The only appointment on the Bench which I could aspire to was that of Chief Justice and I was not interested in it. I had seen enough to realise that dealing with a number of judges, each of them thinking that he was cock of the roost in his own right was not a job I would enjoy. I had in my legal career been with the Attorney General's Department, with the Law Faculty in Legon and on the Bench. I had been involved in Commissions and Committees, sometimes of members who were lawyers by training, and sometimes of lawyers and other disciplines. Of these groups, the level of discussion at meetings which I least enjoyed was that of the judges. Far too often, judges' conferences turned into discussions on privileges and perks. I found that empty. The Courts were often criticised, and I think with justification, for delays in justice. I have seen cases in which judgments have been delayed for months. I have seen judges consistently turn up at work late and break off early, without feeling that they owed the public a duty in putting in some minimum hours of work for their positions. I do not recall any meeting in my time at which the judges have subjected themselves to self-criticism for the faults that the public found with the judiciary.

It is true that the work facilities which the Courts obtained were of the most rudimentary. Their rooms were often poorly appointed. Their libraries, whether the general Court library or the libraries in the chambers of each of them, were poor. Secretarial and clerical assistance for typing of their judgments and the preservation of their papers was the worst in the public services. Where public officials of much lower rank and responsibility had personal private secretaries to assist them, the only person who could boast of such assistance would be the Chief Justice. In the circumstances, justification for their inability to render prompt judicial service to the public was incontrovertible. That they managed, in the face of these disabilities, to give good judgments, as was often the case, was a remarkable feat. But I had wished they would direct more of their undoubted abilities in correcting these defects which incapacitated them from giving the maximum service to the society they were sworn to serve. That they did not, was a matter which caused me anxiety.

Apart from my anxiety over my continued service on a Bench which did not give me much inspiration, I realised that with children growing, I needed to make some money for their education. I knew that at the rate that I was going in the public services, I would not be able to meet the educational needs of those children. I thought the only alternative was to leave the Judicial Service and pursue some activity in the law which would provide more money for me and my family.

There was a provision in the Constitution of 1969 which I thought gave me the opportunity to retire. That Constitution had introduced the most controversial concept of judges retiring on their salaries. It was a condition which Akuffo Addo, as Chief Justice, had fought for. He believed that an impecunious judge was a sure invitation to corruption. But the judge must not only be kept comfortable during his years of service, his retirement comfort should also be assured. Judges in our system, were often appointed late in life to their positions on the Bench. They were, therefore, unable to serve long enough to enable them have a decent pension by the normal process of calculation for the rest of the Public Services. Without the assurance of an old age free of financial worries, it would be impossible to pay judges enough to stop the unscrupulous from adopting dubious means of securing~[* replaced “ensuring” ]~ that future. Of course, the counter-argument which was used by other Public Servants in the debate preceding the Constitution was that as judges were relatively better paid during their service years, they were better able to put more by for the future than the other Public Servants. All were entitled to retirement free from financial worries, and if the judges' concern over this would be an incentive for corruption, so would the concerns of other Public Servants give rise to the same temptation. On the basis of the judges' argument, therefore, everyone in the Public Service should be entitled to retire on his salary. Perhaps the argument on the shortness of service of judges, some of whom might have come from private practice and the fact that, if judges alone were given this privilege, the exchequer would be better able to bear it than if the privilege were to be extended to every Public Servant, decided the Constituent Assembly in favour of granting the privilege to judges alone. Whatever be the case, the Constitution provided for judges retiring on their salary at the age of 65(?)~[* needs to be checked ]~ if they had served as judges for a minimum of 10 years.

But that is not all that the Constitution gave to judges. It also provided that persons who had served for 20 years in the Public Service, 10 years of which had been continuously on the Superior Court Bench should be able to retire under the normal conditions of the Public Service. I do not think that the Constitution makers had a person like me in mind when they made that provision. But it struck me that I would be practically the first judge to qualify at the age of 46 under that rule. I had done 11 years as a lawyer in the Attorney General's Department by the time I was appointed a judge in 1966. By October 1976, I would be qualified for retirement under this provision. I decided to take advantage of it as soon as I was able to.

In the middle of 1976, therefore, I sought an interview with the Chief Justice and told him that I intended to retire at the end of the year. He dismissed this statement lightly, saying that I was not entitled to retire. I asked him to look at the relevant provision in the Constitution. He read it silently for a while; paused for further consideration. Then he said, but the provision was not intended for young people like you. I told him that whether I was thought of by the framers of the Constitution or not, it cannot be denied that I fall squarely within its provisions. He conceded that point, then he pleaded with me to postpone my retirement for a while because people would otherwise think that I was retiring because of the atmosphere surrounding the Ohene-Djan Case. It was the first time that mention of that case had passed between us since he invited me to sit on it. I thought it was quite presumptuous of him, having regard to the part that he played in the debate following that case, to make such a request of me. I refused his request. From then on, time began to count towards my retirement at the end of the year.

He was not present in Ghana when the appointed time arrived. Fred Apaloo was acting as Chief Justice at that time and he organised a farewell ceremony in Court for me. In reply to his touching tribute, I said among other things that there were many challenges facing lawyers in West Africa which I would like to participate in meeting. Among these challenges, I mentioned, just by way of an example, the legal work that I expected would arise in the implementation of the ECOWAS Treaty. The next day, I saw in the newspapers a report of the ceremony saying that I was retiring because I had got a job with ECOWAS. I did not bother to correct them.

On 1st January, 1977, I retired from the Bench and I started practice as a legal consultant.