Former Kenya Sevens player Alex Olaba has challenged a six-year jail term imposed on him by a city court magistrate for threatening to kill a key witness in a rape case against him.
Olaba through Lawyer Cliff Oduk is asking the High Court to quash the six-year jail term for the offence to kill a witness identified as K.A and the two years jail term for defeating justice.
Olaba says he is wholly aggrieved and dissatisfied by the conviction and the sentence imposed by Magistrate G. Onsarigo on May 24, 2023. The Magistrate convicted him for the offense of threatening to kill a key witness in the rape case against him and conspiracy to defeat justice.
In the appeal, Olaba through Lawyer Cliff Oduk, has faulted the magistrate for misapplying the law while convicting him.
“The trial magistrate erred in law and fact by failing to consider that the alleged victim K.A neither recorded a victim nor was she a victim before the trial court,” Oduk says in the petition of appeal.
The convict has also faulted the magistrate for failing to consider that no specific evidence was adduced in regard to the nature, time, manner and place that the alleged victim would be killed.
Olaba says the trial magistrate erred in law by ignoring or not weighing sufficiently the weighty issues raised in the evidence. He also faults the magistrate for not judiciously appreciating the inconsistent and contradictory evidence of prosecution witnesses
Olaba further faults the magistrate for considering numerous untruths that were told by the prosecution witnesses. He further claims the witness were cunning, unreliable, evasive, forgetful and contradictory on material aspects.
