Simon Ndikulyaka versus The Republic; Criminal Appeal No 231 of 2014; Court of Appeal of Tanzania at Bukoba (Unreported).
- Criminal Law
- Possession – when a person is said to have possession?
- Criminal Procedure
- Plea of guilty – Criteria for appellate Court to interfere with conviction based on plea of guilty.
- Legal Method
- Statutory interpretation – purposive approach.
Held:-
(i) For a person to be found to have possession actual or constructive of goods, it must be proved either that he was aware of their presence or that he exercised control over them.
(ii) Criteria for appellate court to interfere with convictions that were based on plea of guilty are:-
(a) That even taking into consideration the admitted facts, the plea was imperfect, ambiguous or unfinished and for that reason, the lower Court erred in law in treating it as a plea of guilty;
(b) That the appellant pleaded guilty as a result of mistake or misapprehension;
(c) That the charge laid at the appellant’s door disclosed no offence known to law; and
(d) That upon the admitted facts the appellant could not in law have been convicted of the offence charged (cited from Lawrent Mpinga v. R (1983) T.L.R. 166).
(ii) In interpreting a statute, purposive construction of statutes may be used to rectify legislative inadvertences or lapses e.g in some election petitions, the Court adopted purposive approaches to interpretation by restoring “corrupt practices’ back into section 114 of the Elections Act, 1985 after the legislature had inadvertently omitted it.