For defiling a nine-year-old JSS 1 pupil, Justice Abiola Soladoye of a Lagos Sexual Offences and Domestic Violence Court on Wednesday sentenced a 35-year-old music teacher, Anthony Okeh, to life imprisonment.

Okeh, a counsellor at Lachez O International School, was found guilty as charged by the state government, which held that the prosecution had successfully discharged the burden of proof of the charge of defilement against Okeh.

The trial judge, while delivering judgment, described Okeh as a pathological liar and a soulless man without any iota of shame.

She noted that a teacher should not engage in unlawful sexual intercourse with his pupil.

Justice Soladoye said the case was direct evidence, and said the survivor was in court to narrate her sexual ordeals at the hands of her music teacher, a sexual predator.

According to her, 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 defendant is a form to distance himself from the crime.

She said, “The defendant is a pathological liar whose evidence is an afterthought and I do not believe him at all. I do not believe the other three defence witnesses as well because their evidence is devoid of truth and they are tainted witnesses.

“Cases are not won on the number of witnesses presented to testify before the court but on the quality of evidence adduced that is credible, convincing, and compelling.”

The judge also said that the survivor in her testimony had narrated how the convict called her upstairs into the music room, where he showed her different nude pictures, claimed to be a cultist, and threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone.

She added, “The survivor recognised the man in the box as her music teacher, who defiled her more than two times in the music room. The testimony of the investigative police officer (IPO) 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 defendant had been doing to her.”

Soladoye further held the IPO’s testimony that the mother of the survivor reported the case to the police and that the statement of the nominal complainant was admitted into evidence.

The court thereafter convicted the defendant on the one-count charge of defilement. She therefore sentenced him to life imprisonment.

The judge also ordered that the convict’s name be registered in the Lagos State Sexual Offences Register.

However, the judge also called on school proprietors and proprietresses to recruit teachers with high moral standards to teach in their schools so as to avoid denting their institutions.

“Furthermore, all stakeholders in the administration of criminal justice must form a strong collaboration in combating sexual violence offences so as to protect the dignity, mental health, physical, and psychological trauma of survivors in such cases,” Soladoye said.

During trial in the suit, the prosecution counsel, Miss Abimbola Abolade, called two witnesses: the survivor and an investigative police officer, while the defence called four witnesses.

Abolade, in her evidence, told the court that the convict committed the offence on Sept. 6, 2022, at Lachez O International School, Agege in Lagos.

The prosecution submitted that the convict had unlawful sexual intercourse with the minor by penetrating her vagina with his penis.

His offence was contrary to the provision of Section 137 of the Criminal Laws of Lagos State, 2015.