Justice Denied? Supreme Court’s Judgement in Sunday Jackson’s Self-Defence Case (Part 3)
The Dissenting Opinion: A Voice Of Moderation (Continues)
Honourable Justice Helen Moronkeji Ogunwumiju, JSC, in her lone but fierce dissent, opined:
“It is not reasonable, nor indeed, natural, to expect that a man who has been stabbed twice and suddenly finds himself struggling for his life, would pause to calibrate the proportionality of his defensive action. The expectation of retreat after such an attack, is neither practical nor fair”.
Her Lordship emphasised the necessity of interpreting the law in light of real human experience, not abstract logic. She criticised the trial court for relying solely on Jackson’s confessional statement, which was never legally contested, but also never corroborated by external forensic or eyewitness evidence. Her dissent concluded that, Jackson acted within the permissible limits of both self-defence and provocation. She called for the exercise of executive clemency, and recommended that Jackson’s case be reconsidered for a possible pardon.
The Critique
The Supreme Court majority decision has been criticised as perverse, unjust and unscholarly by many in the legal community. Writers and Editorials from various public newspaper platforms like The Guardian, ThisDay and Premium times, have lamented that the Judiciary has allowed form to triumph over substance, and that the decision reflects a worrying detachment from the realities of violence, especially in Nigeria’s agrarian belt.
The realities of violence surrounding Adamawa State, is not novel to the natives of the “Land of Beauty”. As an overture, Numan, a town which lends its name to one of the constitutionally established 21 Local Government Areas of Adamawa State in North-East Nigeria, serves as the ancestral homeland of the Bwatiye (also referred to as Bachama) people, a socio-cultural group with transboundary ethnic affiliations, extending into parts of the Republic of Cameroon. Geographically situated within the Benue River basin and nourished by one of its significant tributaries, the Taraba River, Numan’s arable lands have historically supported robust sedentary agricultural activities. In parallel, the region has long accommodated Fulbe pastoralists, who have relied on its grazing potential for the sustenance of their livestock.
These ecological and demographic dynamics have positioned Numan as a significant locus, in the protracted and violent conflict over livelihoods between sedentary agrarian communities and armed nomadic pastoralists in Nigeria’s Middle Belt. Commonly characterised as a crisis arising from “scarce land and water resources”, this conflict is estimated to have resulted in the deaths of approximately 10,000 individuals since about 2013. It is widely regarded as the second most lethal conflict in Nigeria, following the insurgency perpetrated by the Boko Haram group.
From approximately 2015 to early 2018, Numan was a central theatre of violent confrontations between farming communities and armed pastoralist groups. Although the precise casualty figures remain indeterminate, independent reporting such as that by researcher James Court right in a 2023 publication indicates that by the cessation of hostilities in January 2018, approximately 150 persons had been killed, numerous villages razed, and hundreds of Fulbe residents displaced. The severity of the crisis gave rise to legal proceedings before the ECOWAS Court of Justice.
On the 5th of December, 2017, the then Vice-President of Nigeria, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, SAN, undertook an official visit to Adamawa State for a firsthand assessment of the situation. In the aftermath of this visit, the Federal Government implemented emergency relief measures targeting affected communities, including Dong, Lawaru, and Kukumso in Demsa Local Government Area; and Shafaron, Kodomti, Tullum, Mzoruwe, and Mararraban Bare in Numan Local Government Area. Concurrently, the Government initiated a nationwide consultation exercise intended to explore sustainable resolutions to the farmers-herders conflict. However, this initiative ultimately failed to yield conclusive outcomes.
Amidst these developments, the events that unfolded in Jackson’s case in 2018, in the Kodomti village, became the subject of criminal investigation and prosecution, culminating in appellate review by the Supreme Court of Nigeria, which rendered its decision on the 7th of March, 2025. The incident in question, occurred on the 27th of January, 2015, on farmland belonging to one Sunday Jackson, a farmer, who stabbed to death, an assailant, Ardo Bawuro. Following an altercation, Bawuro was found dead, having sustained three fatal stab wounds to the neck, allegedly inflicted by Mr Jackson.
There is yet another major flaw in the judgement. Justice Tsammani, in his concurring judgement, believed that having successfully collected the dagger from Bawuro, one stab was enough and three excessive, showing vengefulness. There was however, no evidence before the Apex Court as to which of the three stabs actually killed Bawuro. Supposing it was the very first stab? There existed a Coroner’s report, nowhere did the judgement mention a Pathologist’s report. Even the extra-judicial statement of Jackson to the Police was self-explanatory: “On Tuesday, 27/01/15 at about 11:10 hrs, I left my village and was cutting thatching grasses in a bush located in Kodomti village in Numan LGA when the deceased, Alh Buba Bawuro as identified attacked me after loosing sight of some persons alleged to be pursuing for killing his cattle. He attacked me in frustration and wanted to stab me with a dagger then we engaged in a wrestling encounter. I succeeded in seizing the dagger from him which I used to stab him thrice on his throat. When the deceased collapsed and was rolling down in a pool of his blood, I took heels and escaped”.
Conclusion: Justice Denied in the Shadow of Law
The case of SUNDAY JACKSON v THE STATE will undoubtedly be remembered for a long time, not merely for its outcome, but for what it reveals about the fractured justice state in Nigeria. It exposes a legal system which, in its current form, too often prioritises theoretical coherence over practical reality; doctrine over humanity; technicalities over substance. The Supreme Court’s judgement, it is respectfully submitted, though cloaked in the flowery language of precedent and procedural neatness, stands as perverse, unscholarly and ultimately, unjustified. It delivered no justice.
To call a man a murderer for surviving an unprovoked, near-fatal attack on his own farmland, is to weaponise the law against its own purpose. Sunday Jackson, a young farmer defending his life and livelihood on his own farmland, acted with the instinct that every human shares of in the will to live. That the Apex Court of the land could dissect this instinct and declare it criminal, speaks volumes of how detached our jurisprudence has become from the people it is meant to serve.
I humbly submit that the judgement is perverse, not because it breaks the law, but because it follows the law to an end so twisted, that it no longer resembles justice. It placed law above justice, whereas the same Apex Court in BELLO v A.G. OYO STATE (1986) 5 NWLR 820 had warned that “the law is but the handmaid to deliver justice”. The Jackson judgement required a man stabbed twice to retreat from his own land to where, we were not told. It expected him to anticipate whether his attacker might find a piece of rock, or regroup for a second assault. It condemns him for failing to act like a measured tactician, weighing proportionality response on an imaginary scale, instead of a terrified human being, battling to save his life. This is legal reasoning turned against lived experience.
I respectfully submit that the judgement is unscholarly, because it refused to engage with evolving legal standards across comparative jurisdictions. Nigerian courts have long clung to outdated colonial constructs, many of which have been discarded or revised in the very legal systems that birthed them. From the “stand your grounds” doctrine in American States, to the Canadian recognition of “psychological trauma” in violent encounters, and even to UK precedents acknowledging “mistaken but honest fear”, the world has since moved forward. The majority judgement in Sunday Jackson, remains rooted in a shrinking past of the better-forgotten dark ages.
Above all, the judgement is wholly unjust. Justice, as both a constitutional promise and a moral imperative, must protect the vulnerable, not punish them for surviving. Justice must never weaponise the State against its citizens. In affirming Jackson’s death sentence, the Apex Court did not uphold justice; it merely enforced legality; and the difference is not semantic; it is foundational. A man who should have been granted mercy, or at worst leniency, was given the harshest penalty known to law. That to me is injustice, calculated and codified.
Furthermore, the Judiciary’s refusal to interrogate the flawed confessional statement extracted without the presence of Counsel and uncorroborated by independent evidence, further reflects the systemic inequities that plague Nigeria’s criminal justice process. This was not merely a case of legal misjudgement; it was a case study in how structural violence is reproduced through courts and clothed in legitimacy.
From the requirement to retreat, to the burden of proving necessity, to the casual dismissal of oral testimony that bore the ring of truth, Jackson was failed at every level by the Police, by Prosecutors, by courts, and ultimately, by the legal system itself. That a dissenting opinion even exists, is a reminder that this case was never clear-cut. It was always contestable, will always be. It was always arguable and will always be. Therefore, it should never have ended with death.
My Take
This article has endeavoured to do what the judgement failed to do: to place the facts, the context, and the humanity of Sunday Jackson at the centre of legal reflection. It has argued that the doctrines of self-defence and provocation must be reformed, to reflect contemporary realities. It has proposed legislative models that anchor the law, not in cold abstraction, but in the moral urgency of justice; of now. In the final analysis, law must be more than logic. It must be a living instrument of equity. It must be an instrument of social engineering (Dean Roscoe Pound). If the system cannot protect a man who defends himself from death, then we must ask: whose life does the law truly value or protect? Which life matters? Let the case of Sunday Jackson, be the moment we stopped asking that question in silence.
Finally, it is submitted that the conviction of Sunday Jackson in the case under review, is an unwarranted violation by the Supreme Court and the lower courts of his right to self-defence and right to life. I humbly submit that the Apex Court majority decision in the case is full of contradictions, inconsistencies and departure from familiar law and its own stare decisis. Self-defence is a taken for granted as a defence, not only in all common law countries and in other jurisdictions, but under international human rights law. It is recognised under Section 33(2)(a) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999. So, why would the Supreme Court undermine it here? As strange and unacceptable as the lead judgement of Hon. Justice M.B. Idris, JSC is in the case, unfortunately, some other Hon. Justices; Emmanuel Agim, Haruna Simon Tsammani and Habeeb Abiru sided with him as they delivered concurring judgements! Only Hon. Justice Helen Ogunwumiju dissented. Equally shocking is the fact that the concurring Justices all failed to hold that, at worst; the Appellant should have been convicted for the lesser offence of manslaughter, rather than culpable homicide punishable with death (murder). Must we always have concurring judgements, especially when those judgements deviate from set stare decisis and they are too terse to be credible?
It is also humbly submitted that, SUNDAY JACKSON v THE STATE is just one of the many inexplicable judgements emanating from our courts, the Apex Court not excluded. The list is increasing: 2020 Imo State Governorship elections case; 2018 Osun State Governorship election case; 2019 Kogi State Governorship election case; Pillars v Desbordes; Machina’s APC Primaries case; Rivers State political crisis case; PDP National Secretary tussle case, etc. Some of these judgements are unconsciously making Nigerians lose confidence in the Judiciary. And, I pray and hope that rampant self-help and anarchy will not follow, if the trend continues. As a sworn Solicitor and Advocate of the Supreme Court of Nigeria, a legal scholar, social critic and a believer in the Nigerian project, I am particularly bothered, because lower courts are bound by some judgements (precedents) which do not serve justice. I implore the Supreme Court to rise up and join the campaign for a new Nigeria that will not just be for the elites, but also for the masses. (The End)
THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK
“At his best, man is the noblest of all animals, separated from law and justice, he is the worst.” (Aristotle)
