The Lagos Special Offences Court in Ikeja has sentenced a 35-year-old school teacher, Anthony Okey, to life imprisonment for raping his 9-year-old student.
Okey’s conviction by the court came barely three years after he committed the crime at the school premises in the Agege axis of the state, where he works as a music teacher.
The school teacher was sentenced yesterday by Justice Abiola Soladoye, who ruled that the prosecution was able to discharge the burden of proof that Anthony, a music teacher, is culpable of the one-count charge of defilement imposed on him by the police.
Before the ruling, the state counsel, Abimbola Abolade, who said that Okey’s offence contravenes Section 137 of the Criminal Laws of Lagos State, 2015, presented two prosecution witnesses—the victim and the Investigative Police Officer in the case—who told the court that findings presented cogent evidence of the convict penetrating the survivor with his penis.
According to Abolade, the offender, who committed the offence on September 6, 2022, at the school premises in Agege, called the minor to a secluded music room and began showing her nude pictures before performing the act.
The prosecutor added that after committing the sexual assault, the transgressor threatened the victim, stating that he was a cultist and would kill her if she dared tell anyone.
After reviewing the evidence tendered by the prosecutor, the judge condemned Okey’s act, adding that a teacher should be an exemplary model who should not be having unlawful sexual intercourse with his pupil.
He said, “The defendant is a soulless man without any iota of shame. The survivor recognised the man in the box as her music teacher who defiled her more than two times in the music room.
“The evidence of the survivor was lucid, cogent, unequivocal, and compelling, and the denial of the convict did not hold water.
“To the mind of this court, the denial of the defendant is a form to distance himself from the crime. The convict is a pathological liar whose evidence is an afterthought, and I do not believe him at all.
“The testimony of the Investigative Police Officer, IPO 1, was corroborated by the testimony of the survivor when she said that the mother of the girl noticed her reluctance to go to school and she later confessed to her mother what the convict had been doing to her.
“The IPO said that the mother of the survivor reported the case to the police. The statement of the nominal complainant was admitted into evidence.”
“The defendant is sentenced to life imprisonment. His name should be registered in the Lagos State Sexual Offences Register.”
The judge also advised school owners to recruit teachers with high moral standards to teach in their schools to avoid a dent in their institutions.
“Furthermore, all stakeholders in the administration of criminal justice must form a strong collaboration in combating sexual violence offences to protect the dignity, mental health, physical and psychological trauma of survivors in such cases,” Soladoye said.
