A charge and an allegation are one and the same
The Milimani Law Courts. Concerning what goes on in our courts of law, to charge is exactly the same thing as to allege or to claim. FILE PHOTO
What you need to know:
- For a trial is called so precisely because it is the judicial process of weighing the pros against the cons of a charge so as to arrive at a more or less objective verdict.
- Once you have written that a person was charged in a court of law, the adverb allegedly becomes absolutely unnecessary in the same verbal breath because the charge is already the allegation.
Concerning what goes on in our courts of law, to charge is exactly the same thing as to allege or to claim.
What the police officer or any other prosecutor has written in his/her charge sheet is precisely that — a charge, a claim or an allegation.
But if a mere charge were the gospel truth, why would anybody need to take it through the whole protracted process of a trial?
For a trial is called so precisely because it is the judicial process of weighing the pros against the cons of a charge so as to arrive at a more or less objective verdict.
Yet, though I have warned against it a million times before, the court reporters of all of Nairobi’s dailies continue to claim that a person was “...charged with allegedly...” committing one crime or another.
Having worked throughout East Africa for upwards of 50 years as a reporter, sub-editor, chief sub-editor, editorial copy reviser, editorial quality controller, managing editor and editor-in-chief, I know exactly what the problem is.
It concerns the daily newsroom struggle between correct language and legal permissibility.
Because the newspapers often pay through the nose for libellous writing, their reporters have been told in no uncertain terms never to libel any person or institution.
Constitutionally, only in the precincts of a court of law and in the chambers of a law-making body can one make a damagingly snide claim against anybody or institution without fear of libelling him, her or it.
TAUTAOLOGY
Yet after the court reporter has written that a person was charged with, say, robbery, the reporter tries to distance both himself and his company even further from that charge by stressing that the charge was only an allegation.
But an effort like that is what William Shakespeare would have dismissed as much ado about nothing.
For, because a charge is already — ipso facto — the same thing as an allegation, you do not euphemise or mitigate it by calling a charge an allegation.
To append the adverb allegedly to the verb to charge is exactly the same thing as to append that same adverb to the verb to allege.
It is like saying that our mutual friend Anne Waiguru lost her Cabinet seat as a consequence of what her political enemies had allegedly alleged against her.
To say that “...a charge was allegedly made...” is like saying that the charge was made chargedly or that the claim was made claimedly. Balderdash!
Yet such ludicrous tautology passes muster into the pages of all of East Africa’s English-language newspapers every day that the sun rises from the eastern horizon.
Once you have written that a person was charged in a court of law, the adverb allegedly becomes absolutely unnecessary in the same verbal breath because the charge is already the allegation.
In that case, the word allegedly neither adds any semantic value to your statement nor offers you any additional legal protection from the outfit of our brother Willy Mutung’a, the Chief Justice.
