Ondo court sentences lecturer to death for robbing taxi driver at gun point
Weapons for armed robbery
BY ADETOKUNBO ABIOLA
Justice O.M. Adejumo of the Ondo State High Court has sentenced Shittu Isiaka, a lecturer at the College of Health Technology, Ijero-Ekiti, Ekiti State, to death for robbing a taxi driver of his vehicle on the Akure-Ilesha Expressway.
Justice O. M. Adejumo delivered the judgment in Akure, the Ondo State capital, after finding the defendant guilty on two counts of conspiracy and armed robbery, but discharging and acquitting him on the third count, bordering on endangering life or health.
The prosecution told the court that on July 5, 2017, at about 11 a.m., the defendant and others still at large robbed one Olatunji Olowoyeye of his Nissan Cabstar vehicle with registration number XJ 214 KTU at gunpoint along Ibuji on the Akure–Ilesha Expressway.
Testifying before the court, the victim, Olowoyeye, said the defendant and two others hired him at Ilesa to convey cocoa beans from Igbara-Oke with his Nissan vehicle for the sum of N20,000, paying N8,000 and promising to pay the balance after the trip.
He said trouble started when they asked him to reverse his vehicle into a bush near a primary school at Ibuji, with one of the men suddenly bringing out a gun.
Olowoyeye said the men dragged him out of the vehicle, collected the key, his phone and money, tied his hands and legs, while the defendant injected him with a substance, before tying him to a tree.
He added that he later escaped and struggled to the main road, where police officers rescued him and took him to the hospital, where he spent about 15 days, passing bloody urine.
Testifying, a police witness, Inspector Kehinde Omotosho, said that the victim was brought to the Igbara-Oke Police Station naked by highway patrol officers, after which he made a statement implicating the defendant.
During the trial, the defendant denied his involvement in the robbery, as well as denied injecting the victim with any substance, arguing that police investigators did not present any syringe or other items allegedly used in the crime.
In his judgment, Justice Adejumo held that the prosecution failed to prove the offence of endangering life through an injected substance as required by Section 135(1) of the Evidence Act, noting that there was no eyewitness account of the alleged injection and no medical report to support the victim’s claim of hospitalisation, but found sufficient evidence linking the defendant to the robbery.
He therefore convicted Isiaka for conspiracy to commit armed robbery, sentencing him to life imprisonment for conspiracy and death by hanging for the armed robbery offence.
