MP Defends Tony Lithur: His Cross Examination Style Is The Best

Member of Parliament (MP) for Builsa North, James Agalga has defended the cross examination style of Lawyer Tony Lithur, in the Supreme Court case challenging the 2012 elections results.

“There were pink sheets generated from all the polling stations in issue and so in order to do justice to your case, as a lawyer, I would do the same,” he said.

“I will cross examine on every single pink sheet which is in evidence. If you don’t traverse them, it goes against you and that is a cardinal rule in evidence. That, evidence adduced by your opponent if not traversed is taken to be credible. It is assumed that you admit the content of that particular piece of evidence proffered by your opponent. And so what Tony Lithur is doing is not to waste the courts time. He is being meticulous, he is being diligent and he would cross examine on every single one of them,” he maintained.

The Interior Minister designate, stated his support for the technique adopted by Lawyer Tony Lithur, the counsel for President John Dramani Mahama in a radio discussion on Accra-based Citi FM despite the condemnation and the assertion that the intent to cross examine on every pink sheet form each polling station in contention is a ploy to waste the time of the highest court of the land.

Others have also said that, his style of cross examination betrays the fact that the counsel for the first respondent has been overwhelmed by the revelations of the irregularities in the elections and therefore does not know what else to do but while away the time by the modus adopted.

The counsels of both the petitioners and the respondents have accused each other of unpreparedness and feet dragging attitudes employed to delay the start and expeditious trial at various stages.

However, James Agalga was of the view that the “concessions and admissions” by Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, the second petitioner in the case with regards to the pink sheets are very important and “any attempt to play it down would not make any difference because the concessions have already been made”.

“Here is a witness that spoke at length about how votes were duplicated and all that. Then it turns out that they themselves marked the same pink sheets differently. Now when he was pinned to the wall, he turns round and says, ooh as for those ones they were manually generated. And that when they detected certain errors on the face of those particular pink sheets generated manually, he decided to base his analysis on a CD ROM. Well time will tell,” he said.