Right Court, Wrong Complaint: How a Death Sentence Appeal Failed Without the Facts Ever Being Reheard: Adamu v. State [2026] 11 NWLR 523 (SC)


Right Court, Wrong Complaint: How a Death Sentence Appeal Failed Without the Facts Ever Being Reheard

Case: Adamu v. State [2026] 11 NWLR 523 (SC) Court: Supreme Court of Nigeria

Sometimes an appeal doesn't fail because the arguments were weak. It fails because the arguments, however good they might have been, were never actually connected to anything the appellant had formally complained about. This 2026 Supreme Court decision is a masterclass in appellate drafting gone wrong, and a useful reminder that in Nigerian appellate practice, how you challenge a judgment matters just as much as what you're challenging.

A Killing, an Alibi, and Two Courts in Agreement

The appellant, along with others, was tried at the High Court of Kano State for conspiracy and culpable homicide punishable with death, over the killing of a woman named Hauwa Yunusa. At trial, the prosecution's evidence came from eyewitnesses who placed the appellant at the scene, along with a medical report confirming both the death and its cause. The appellant's defence was alibi: he testified he'd been at a mosque on the Friday in question and wasn't present when Hauwa Yunusa was killed.

The trial court weighed the evidence, found the eyewitness testimony clear, credible, and positive, and concluded it dislodged the alibi entirely. The appellant was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. He appealed to the Court of Appeal, which conducted its own review of the same evidence, reached the same conclusion, and affirmed the conviction. He then appealed further, to the Supreme Court.

Three Issues, and a Structural Problem With All of Them

At the Supreme Court, the appellant's brief raised three issues. The first argued that after the original charge had been amended, no fresh plea was ever taken on the amended version, and that this made the entire trial null and void for lack of jurisdiction. The second and third, in substance, both asked the Court to look again at the evidence and decide whether the prosecution had really proven its case beyond reasonable doubt, given what the appellant described as material contradictions in the testimony against him.

On paper, these might sound like reasonable things to raise. The problem, as the Supreme Court's analysis revealed, was how each of them connected, or failed to connect, to the actual grounds of appeal filed.

The Court's Reasoning

An Issue Has to Match Its Ground, Not Just Cite One

Every appeal is built on formal grounds of appeal: the specific complaints about what the lower court got wrong, and the issues for determination that follow are supposed to be questions distilled directly from those grounds. The Court reaffirmed a strict rule here: an issue that doesn't actually arise from, or relate to, any ground of appeal is incompetent and won't be considered, no matter how well-argued it might be.

Here's where the appellant's first issue ran into trouble. It was formally labelled as being distilled from ground 5 of the notice of appeal. But ground 5, as actually written, complained only in general terms that the appellant's constitutional right to fair hearing had been breached, nothing about pleas, amended charges, or jurisdiction. Issue No. 1, by contrast, argued something completely different: that the absence of a fresh plea after the charge was amended stripped the trial court of jurisdiction entirely, rendering the whole trial a nullity. Since nothing in ground 5, or anywhere else in the notice of appeal, actually raised that jurisdictional complaint, the issue simply wasn't tethered to anything. Labelling it as arising from ground 5 didn't make it so.

A Ground With No Issue Attached Is Treated as Given Up

There was a second, related problem lurking in the notice of appeal: one of the grounds, ground 1, had no issue formulated from it at all anywhere in the appellant's brief. The Court applied the flip side of the same rule: a ground of appeal that nobody bothers to build an issue around is treated as abandoned, and gets struck out. Raising a complaint formally in your notice of appeal, and then never actually arguing it, achieves nothing procedurally. It's as if the complaint was never made.

Dressing Up a Procedural Point as a Jurisdictional One Doesn't Change What It Is

Even setting aside the mismatch with ground 5, the appellant's first issue had a second, independent problem: it was being raised for the very first time at the Supreme Court, having never been argued at trial or at the Court of Appeal, and it was raised without first seeking the court's permission to introduce a fresh issue at this late stage. That omission alone is generally fatal.

The appellant's counsel had tried to frame the missing fresh plea as a matter of substantive jurisdiction, the kind of fundamental defect that supposedly can be raised at any time, in any court, without needing leave. The Court wasn't persuaded by that framing. Whatever legal consequence might flow from failing to take a fresh plea after a charge amendment, the underlying complaint is, at its core, a procedural one, a question of compliance with specific procedural provisions, not a challenge to the court's basic constitutional authority to hear the case at all. Calling it jurisdictional didn't transform its actual character. Being procedural, it needed leave to be raised fresh at the Supreme Court, and since none was sought, it couldn't be entertained. The fair hearing complaint in ground 5 suffered the identical fate, having also surfaced for the first time at this final stage without leave.

Appeals Narrow as They Climb, They Don't Stay Wide Open

Turning to the second and third issues, both of which, in substance, asked the Court to re-examine the trial evidence and decide afresh whether guilt had been proven, the Court offered a useful image for how the appellate process is meant to work. Think of it as an inverted funnel: a case starts wide at trial, where every fact is up for grabs, and it's supposed to keep narrowing as it climbs — each successive court hearing a tighter, more targeted set of complaints than the one before, not the same broad questions asked all over again. An issue raised at the apex court, particularly one touching on facts or mixed questions of law and fact, can't simply repackage the same wide, general questions that were already fully argued and decided twice below. It needs to zero in on something specific and substantial about the actual judgment being appealed.

The appellant's issues 2 and 3 didn't do that. They were general and vague, essentially inviting a third full run through the same evidence the trial court and Court of Appeal had already each independently evaluated, without pointing to any specific finding, or any particular error in how either lower court had approached the facts.

You Can't Challenge a Conclusion Without Challenging What It's Built On

This is the structural problem that ran through the whole appeal, and it's worth understanding on its own terms, since it comes up often in Nigerian appellate practice. A conviction is the end product of a chain of specific factual findings: that a death occurred, that it was caused by a particular act, that the accused was the person responsible, and so on. Where an appellant challenges only the final conclusion (the conviction was wrong) without separately and specifically challenging the individual findings that conclusion was actually built on, the appeal is, in a real sense, arguing against nothing. The Court was direct about this: such an appeal doesn't stand a chance, since there's really nothing left to argue once the reasoning behind the conclusion is left untouched. Without a ground of appeal attacking any of the specific findings, that the deceased died, that the appellant caused it, that the eyewitness evidence was credible and not contradictory, that the alibi was dislodged, those findings stand as accepted, correct, and binding by default.

Why This Particularly Matters for Concurrent Findings

The Court tied this back to the settled principle governing appeals against findings that two lower courts have already agreed on. Where a trial court has evaluated evidence, made specific findings, and reached a conclusion, and the Court of Appeal has independently reviewed that same evidence and confirmed those findings, the Supreme Court's role in reviewing them a third time is deliberately narrow, limited to checking whether the findings are perverse, or resulted from some violation of law or procedure that caused a real miscarriage of justice. An issue for determination in that context has to be crafted to fit within that narrow lane. General, sweeping requests to simply re-weigh the evidence again fall outside it entirely.

Final Verdict

The Supreme Court unanimously found no merit in the appeal. Issue No. 1 and ground 5 were struck out for the mismatch and lack-of-leave problems; ground 1 was struck out as abandoned; and issues 2 and 3 were resolved against the appellant for failing to properly engage with, or challenge, the specific findings underlying his conviction. The appeal was dismissed, and the conviction and death sentence stood.

Key Takeaways

  • An issue for determination has to genuinely match the ground of appeal it claims to come from. Simply labelling an issue as arising from a particular ground doesn't make it so if the substance doesn't line up.
  • A ground of appeal nobody argues is treated as abandoned. Raising a complaint in your notice of appeal isn't enough on its own; it needs a matching issue actually built around it.
  • Calling something "jurisdictional" doesn't change its true legal character. A genuinely procedural defect still needs leave to be raised for the first time on appeal, whatever label counsel gives it.
  • Appeals are meant to narrow, not repeat, at each stage. By the time a case reaches the Supreme Court, issues need real specificity, not a general request to re-run the trial's evidence a third time.
  • You cannot successfully appeal a conclusion while leaving the underlying findings unchallenged. If you don't specifically attack the individual facts a conviction is built on, those facts are treated as accepted, and the conclusion built on them stands.

Test

  1. What was the supreme court's ruling in the case?
  2. Why did the supreme court reject the appellant's argument regarding the lack of a fresh plea to the amended charge?
  3. What legal principle does the supreme court apply when an appellant challenges a conviction without contesting specific findings of fact?


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