Slip Rule

Katuramu John Sanyu & 49 Ors v Attorney General (CONSTITUTIONAL APPLICATION NO.1 OF 2016 ) [2017] UGSC 31 (28 April 2017);

Flynote: 

Search Summary: 

This was an application seeking a declaration
that the order of court dated 21ST January

2009 in Attorney General VS Susan Kigula
and 417 others SCCA No. 3 of 2006 referred to
as the 1st order, was an accidental “slip or
omission or was a mistake or error of law
apparent on the face of the record”, that the
accidental slip or omission be corrected with
the result that the applicant shall be entitled to
remission on their sentences as per the relevant
provisions of the Prisons Act, Or in the
alternative to paragraph 2 above, an order that
the mistake or error of law apparent on the face
of the record be corrected with the result that
the applicants shall be entitled to remission on
their sentences as per the relevant provisions of
the Prisons Act and an order that the
respondent bear the costs of the application.

Headnote and Holding: 

The grounds of the application are that the
applicants ought to be heard in mitigation after
the ruling in Suzan Kigula even if their
sentences had been confirmed by the highest
court in Uganda. The court held that
applicants have failed to give sufficient reasons
to justify the filing of the application after
eight years and two month for the delay. That
the two orders this court made were deliberate,
well intended and were meant to serve
independent purposes. That that there was no
mistake on the face of the record. It was a
manifest intention of the Court when it made
the first order commuting sentence from death
to life imprisonment without remission for

convicts whose death sentences had been
confirmed by the Supreme Court. This was
logical because their cases could not be
remitted to the High Court for mitigation.

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