Accra · Memorial
The Martyrs of the Rule of Law: Ghana’s Three Murdered Judges
On the night of 30 June 1982, during a national curfew, three High Court judges and a retired army officer were taken from their homes, driven out onto the Accra Plains, shot, and set on fire. Rain put the fire out, which is the only reason their families had bodies to bury. Their busts stand today in the forecourt of the Supreme Court in Accra.
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The night of 30 June 1982
Ghana was under military rule and under curfew. The Provisional National Defence Council had seized power six months earlier, on 31 December 1981, removing the elected government of Dr Hilla Limann. Soldiers patrolled the streets at night. Ordinary Ghanaians did not go out after dark, and the people who did were the people with the authority to.
Between nine o’clock and half past ten on the evening of Wednesday 30 June 1982, four people were taken from their homes in Accra. Three were serving judges of the High Court. The fourth was a retired army major.
They were driven roughly fifty kilometres to the Bundase Military Range on the Accra Plains — an army firing range, empty at night, with no witnesses. There they were shot. The pathologists’ reports later recorded multiple gunshot wounds in each case; all four deaths were classified as unnatural.
The bodies were then doused in petrol and set alight. What the killers did not plan for was the weather. A heavy downpour came through the plains that night and put the fire out. The bodies burned but did not disappear. They were found in the days that followed, charred and decomposing, on an army range belonging to the government of Ghana.
Had it stayed dry, there would have been nothing to find, no pathology, no evidence, and almost certainly no trial. Ghana knows what happened to its judges because of rain.
Who they were
They are usually referred to collectively, which is convenient and does them a disservice. They were four separate people with four separate lives, and the details matter.
Mr Justice Frederick Poku Sarkodee
Judge of the High Court, 1971–1982 · born Koforidua, 26 August 1927 · aged 54Educated at Adisadel College in Cape Coast, where in 1948 he joined the student strike protesting the colonial arrest of the Big Six — and was expelled for it. He completed his A-Levels privately with tutors his father hired, went on to Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, and was called to the Bar at Middle Temple.
He joined the Attorney-General’s office, became a Senior Attorney in 1966, and was appointed to the High Court bench on 22 May 1971. He was an advocate for women’s property rights years before the Intestate Succession Law of 1985 gave spouses protection under customary law. The Bar remembered him as a judge unafraid to expand the frontiers of the law.
He was thrown out of school for protesting an arrest made by the British. He was murdered by the government of an independent Ghana.
Mrs Justice Cecilia Koranteng-Addow
Judge of the High Court, 1975–1982 · born Assin Nsuta, 1936 · aged 46Born Cecilia Afran Gaisie. Primary school at the Roman Catholic school in Assin Anyinabrim and the Methodist school at Assin Edubiase, then secondary education in Cape Coast, finishing at Holy Child High School in 1959. She read law at the University of Hull, was called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1963, and returned to Ghana in 1964. She was appointed to the High Court in 1975.
She was a mother. On the night she was taken she was still nursing a child.
The Bar described her as cut out for the profession, with a sharp and penetrating brain for unravelling problems. She was the only woman among the four, and she was killed in the same manner as the others.
Mr Justice Kwadwo Agyei Agyapong
Judge of the High Court, 1977–1982 · born Oyoko, Ashanti Region, November 1926 · aged 55Educated at Mfantsipim School on scholarship from 1942, then Wesley College in Kumasi, where he qualified as a teacher. A Cocobod scholarship took him to King’s College London, and he was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple.
Appointed to the High Court in 1977. In 1980 he was the only High Court judge to sit on the transitional Supreme Court bench for one of the most significant constitutional cases in Ghanaian legal history. In May 1979 he chaired an inquiry into the Accra railway administration.
He left ten children. One of them, Kwabena Agyapong, later became a prominent figure in Ghanaian public life and has laid wreaths at the memorial on behalf of the bereaved families.
Major Sam Acquah (retired)
Retired army officer · senior executive, Ghana Industrial Holding Corporation (GIHOC)The fourth victim, and the one most often left out of the shorthand. Major Acquah was not a judge. He was a retired army officer working in a senior role at GIHOC, the state industrial corporation.
His inclusion is the detail that unlocks the motive, and it is dealt with in the next section.
Why they were killed
This is not a mystery and it never was. The four had one thing in common, and it was their work.
In 1979, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council — the first military government led by Jerry John Rawlings — had run revolutionary courts that handed down long prison sentences. When constitutional rule returned later that year, cases came before the ordinary courts, and judges of the High Court reviewed those convictions. In a number of them, they ordered people released.
All four victims had adjudicated on such cases. All four had ordered, or been party to ordering, the release of people the revolution had imprisoned.
The link is sharpest in the case of Justice Koranteng-Addow. She had presided over a matter arising from a riot by workers of the Ghana Industrial Holding Corporation, who had attacked Parliament. One of the leaders of those rioters was a man named Joachim Amartey Quaye. By 1982 he was no longer a rioter. He was one of the seven original members of the Provisional National Defence Council — a member of the government of Ghana. He was convicted of involvement in her murder.
And that also explains Major Acquah, whose presence otherwise looks inexplicable. He was a senior figure at GIHOC. The judge who heard the GIHOC case and the GIHOC executive were taken on the same night, by the same people, to the same firing range.
This was not a random atrocity of a violent period. It was a settling of accounts, carried out by people with access to vehicles, weapons and the freedom to move during curfew.
Archive footage: the funeral
The murder and funeral of the three judges
Archive footage of the murder and funeral of the three judges and Major Sam Acquah. The scale of the public mourning in this film is the part worth watching — a country under military rule, turning out in numbers, for four people the state had killed.
The investigation
The PNDC declared itself horrified. Public anger was immediate and it did not subside, and under that pressure the government appointed a Special Investigation Board to find out what had happened.
Its chairman was Justice Samuel Azu Crabbe, a former Chief Justice of Ghana. That appointment mattered: a former head of the judiciary investigating the murder of three of its judges, with a government that had every reason to want a narrow finding.
The Board did its work. Its report led directly to charges being brought.
The trial and the executions
Case number 24/83, The People v Joachim Amartey Kwei and four others, opens at the Old State House in Accra before a National Public Tribunal chaired by Mr George Agyekum, sitting with Madam Comfort Doe, Staff Sergeant Mumuni Seidu, Mr Jenkins Kofie and Lance Corporal Moses Tonka.
Joachim Amartey Quaye, then 32, a member of the PNDC. Lance Corporal Samuel Kwaku Amedeka, 27. Lance Corporal Michael Senya, 21. Johnny Dzandu, 23. Tony Tekpor, 24. Amedeka had escaped and was tried in his absence.
The Tribunal delivers judgement. All five are convicted and sentenced to death.
Joachim Amartey Quaye dies at Nsawam, executed by firing squad. The other convicted men present in the country are executed. Amedeka, who fled the country, was never brought back.
Read those ages again. Twenty-one. Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-seven. The men who pulled the triggers were, for the most part, very young soldiers, and they were shot for it within fourteen months.
What was never answered
Five men were convicted and four were executed. What has never been resolved to the satisfaction of the Ghanaian legal profession is the question above them: who gave the order, and how far up it went.
A member of the ruling council was convicted. That is not a rogue corporal. It is a member of the government of Ghana participating in the murder of three of its own judges, and the obvious question — whether he acted alone at that level — has been asked continuously for more than forty years without a settled public answer.
The National Reconciliation Commission, established two decades later to examine human rights abuses during Ghana’s periods of unconstitutional rule, revisited the era. The Bar has since spoken publicly of forgiveness, in response to the Commission’s call for reconciliation. Forgiveness, though, is not the same as an answer, and the Bench and Bar have been careful to say that they forgive without forgetting.
Why this page exists on a travel site. Visitors to Accra are shown the independence monuments, the castles and the mausoleum — the history a country is comfortable presenting. This is the other kind. A functioning legal system, judges doing their jobs, and a government that killed them for it. Ghana today is one of the more stable constitutional democracies in West Africa, and the distance between 1982 and now is not an accident. It was built deliberately, by people who remembered.
Visiting the memorial
Where to find it
The busts of the three judges stand in the forecourt of the Supreme Court of Ghana in Accra, together forming the Memorial to the Martyrs of the Rule of Law. This is the working Supreme Court, not a museum: the forecourt is visible and the memorial is publicly sited, but this is a secure judicial precinct. Be discreet, be respectful, do not photograph security arrangements or personnel, and follow whatever a court officer tells you without argument.
The judges served on the High Court, and the High Court complex sits within the same judicial quarter of central Accra — but the memorial itself is at the Supreme Court. If you are asking directions, ask for the Supreme Court.
30 June is Martyrs’ Day. Each year the Chief Justice lays a wreath at the memorial on behalf of the Judiciary, followed by the President of the Ghana Bar Association and a representative of the bereaved families, with a remembrance service afterwards at Christ the King Catholic Church. In recent years lawyers have been formally excused from court appearances that day so that the profession can attend. If you are in Accra on 30 June and have any interest in how a country repairs itself, this is the thing to see.
Nearby, and worth combining into the same walk: Parliament, the Osu Military Cemetery, and the Accra Sports Stadium all sit within the same part of the city, and the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park is a short distance away.
Guided tours of Accra and the coast
The judicial quarter is not on any standard itinerary, and no tour will take you to it. But the wider history this page sits inside — Independence Square, the Nkrumah Memorial Park, Jamestown and the coastal forts — is exactly what the Accra and coastal tours cover, and a good guide will talk about the Rawlings years if you ask. The memorial itself you can walk to afterwards, on your own, in fifteen minutes.
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Verified: 22 August 2026.
Compiled from the published record of the Judicial Service of Ghana and the Ghana Bar Association’s annual Martyrs’ Day commemorations; the findings of the Special Investigation Board chaired by former Chief Justice Samuel Azu Crabbe; the record of National Public Tribunal case 24/83, The People v Joachim Amartey Kwei and four others, opened 20 July 1983 with judgement delivered 15 August 1983; and contemporaneous and archival Ghanaian reporting including the Ghanaian Times, GhanaWeb, ModernGhana and The Dispatch. Biographical details of the four victims are as read into the record at Judicial Service remembrance services. Sources differ on the precise date the bodies were discovered, given as between 1 and 3 July 1982; this page therefore states only that they were found in the days following. This page makes no allegation against any person not convicted by the Tribunal.