Sospeter Mayala versus The Republic

Sospeter Mayala versus The Republic; Criminal Appeal No 318 of 2013: Court of Appeal of Tanzania at Mwanza (Unreported).

• Criminal Procedure

• Sentence – When an appellate court may interfere with sentence?

Held:-

(a) An appellate court may interfere with the sentence imposed where the sentence imposed is illegal or the sentencing judge had acted on a wrong principle or had overlooked or ignored to take into account a relevant consideration or in the inverse, had taken into account an extraneous or irrelevant matter, or had meted out a manifestly excessive or patently inadequate or clearly unreasonable sentence.

(b) An appellate court cannot interfere with or overturn that sentence merely because if the court itself had exercised the trial judge’s discretion, it would have imposed a different one.