Amechi Ogo, 28, was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Delta State High Court sitting in Asaba and presided over by Honourable Justice Flora Ngozi Azinge.

A charge of rape was leveled against the defendant for having unlawful carnal contact with his child at Asaba on 31st May 2018, contrary to section 218 of the Delta State Criminal Code.

Mrs. P.U. Akamagwuna, Director, of the Sexual Offences Unit, Ministry of Justice, told the court that the defendant demanded sex from his wife on a fateful day. He forced himself on his four-year-old daughter after his wife rejected him and left the house on an errand. As he fled, he was caught in the act by a neighbor.

Afterward, the police arrested him. There was a confessional statement submitted in court by the defendant.

In his trial, the defendant retracted the confessional statement and denied committing the offense.

In her ruling on February 1st, 2023, Honorable Justice Flora Ngozi Azinge stated that the confessional statement of the defendant and the testimony of the witness who saw him in the act proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the crime.

The defense advanced by the defendant in his confessional statement—that he lost all sense of reason after a native doctor touched him and told him to have sex with any woman he saw—was unworkable, according to Justice Azinge, and was rejected as an afterthought.

She characterized the defendant as a pedophile who violated God’s laws by raping his own daughter in a callous, animalistic, and barbaric manner.

She stated that society needed to be protected from persons like the defendant who prey on children. The court thereafter sentenced the defendant to life imprisonment.

Speaking to a newsman after the judgment, Mrs. P. U. Akamagwuna said that the State Ministry of Justice will continue to aggressively prosecute all sex-related offenders in line with the ministry’s zero-tolerance policy for such heinous crimes.

Remember that the Ministry of Justice’s Sexual Offenses Unit had already recorded three verdicts in cases involving sex-related offenses during the current legal year?

The defendant has since been listed in the national database and the Delta State Sex Offenders Register, respectively.