Monday, January 11, 2016
The issue of dumping documents on trial
When a party decides to rely on documents to prove his case there must be a link between the documents and the specific area(s) of the petition. He must relate each document to the specific area of his case for which the document was tendered. On no account must counsel dump documents on the trial court. No court would spend precious judicial time linking documents to specific areas.
By mere dumping the documents which were tendered through counsel, there still remain questions or issues needing resolutions. In other words the nature of the documents that were tendered needed to be explained and related to the reason why they are produced; the identity of the witnesses through whom the documents were tendered was relevant; there was also the necessity that the documents be linked to specific areas or issues in the petition. The failure to identify the witnesses and specifically linking them to each of the documents was detrimental to the appellant's case. It is the failure of the appellant to call a
witness to provide the necessary nexus between the documentary evidence tendered and the particular purpose or aspect of the case of the party tendering same that makes the difference between and the notion of dumping exhibits on the one hand and tendering bulk exhibits on the other. Buhari v. I.N.E.C (2008)18 NWLR (Pt.1120) 246 ; Ucha v. Elechi (2012) 13 NWLR (Pt.1317) 330; A.N.P.P. v. I.N.E.C (2010) 13 NWLR (Pt.1212) 549
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This is one of the most embarrassing aspects of Nigerian jurisprudence where the court is influenced more by the African traditional paternalistic thinking than by reason or law. Documents admitted in evidence are of two types. There are those admitted on the basis that they were made by the witness and are an alternative to oral testimony (with exceptions relating to certain circumstances where the requirement that the witness should be the maker of the document is dispensed with) and then there are official or public documents which are admitted as an exception to the hearsay rule. There is no requirement of law that the maker of an official document should be the witness through whom it is tendered provided that it is certified according to law. When a document has passed the test of admissibility and is admitted, the job of the witness through whom the document is tendered ends except to answer questions in cross examination over it. The witness is not required to explain the document to the court or begin to relate it to any aspect of the petition or claim, which is prepared by the lawyer and the full content of which the witness, who is only concerned with the particular testimony that he is called to give, may not know. Indeed, no oral evidence is permissible to explain a document. The law is that a document speaks for itself. When it is a public document, the witness is usually not the maker and may not know, and is not expected to know, the circumstances of the making of the document. The court is expected to take judicial notice of that. The witness tenders the document only as a person who obtained it from official records. The content of the document is accepted as the truth of what it states. The testimony of the witness can neither add nor subtract from it. Again, the Evidence Act does not expect the witness to relate the evidence, which may be given by compulsion under subpoena, to any petition. After a document is admitted, it becomes the job of counsel to make submissions to the court regarding what use he wishes to make of it and to relate it or any aspects of his case. It is counsel that knows the case he is putting before the court, not the witness. "Dumping" of documents is a concept of American law which describes the mischievous practice where counsel buries a document required to be produced or frontloaded in a ton of other documents in the hope that it would be missed by his opponent or lost in the pile. It does not apply to documents that the court has admitted in evidence and which the other side had the opportunity to cross examine on and which counsel can relate to his case in submissions to the court. It is the duty of the Court to study all the documents it has admitted in evidence. It cannot resort to imperialism to subsequently reject documents it has admitted in evidence or deny them their true effect due to its laziness to study the documents and cover up such laziness with the excuse of "dumping" which is a word that does not occur anywhere in the Evidence Act.
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