Martin Kpebu is a legal practitioner
Private legal practitioner, Martin Kpebu, has expressed strong disapproval of the decision by the embattled Chief Justice Gertrude Torkornoo to engage the services of former Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Godfred Dame, as her legal counsel in the court case seeking to halt her removal process.
Reacting to Torkornoo’s suit, Kpebu described her choice of legal representation as “terrible,” arguing that Godfred Dame’s past controversies, particularly the leaked audio tape from the Ambulance case trial involving Richard Jakpa, have tarnished his image and could potentially affect the entire suit.
“The optics are very bad in her choice of Gofred Dame as lawyer. It’s terrible and I can’t believe it. People had made comments earlier on, so I thought the Chief Justice would have taken a cue from it,” he said on TV3 on Thursday, May 22, 2025.
The legal luminary, in his argument, stated that Dame’s actions in the Jakpa case exhibited gross misconduct, which, in any other circumstance, would have ended his legal career.
He maintained that, given Dame’s supposed tarnished image, Torkornoo should not have associated herself with him, adding that it could raise suspicions of alleged connivance between the two, especially since Dame was not made to appear before the General Legal Council despite the tape implicating him at the time Torkornoo was in power as Chief Justice.
“Dame in the Jakpa tape did a lot of unethical things like coaching a witness to go and lie to the court, asking the witness to get a fake medical report, saying that Akufo-Addo and Ofori-Atta were on his neck to use the judicial system to prosecute Ato Forson and Jakpa – So, that’s persecution. Using the judicial system for their own political ends, and the tape is official. It was admitted as evidence in court,” he said.
“So, for the rest of Gofred Dame’s life, that tape is him. Whether the case goes to the General Legal Counsel or not, whether he is found liable or not, the judge admitted the tape as authentic so, for a lawyer who is done such a thing, and many lawyers are saying he should be sanctioned by the general legal counsel, and yet he has been chosen by the suspended Chief Justice as a lawyer begins to raise a lot of suspicions. Is it because of the alliance that Godfred Dame didn’t appear before the General Legal Council, or that Godfred Dame has not been sanctioned? She should have seen all of that,” he added.
Kpebu concluded by stating that Torkornoo might end up regretting her choice of legal representation once hearings for her case begin, urging her to immediately disengage her lawyer.
“Other things will come up, other news and information will come up that will make this choice more terrible than it already appears, and so, the best thing for the Chief Justice to do is to disengage Dame. Dame leading her in this case is a terrible engagement,” he stressed.
MAG/VPO
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