Contemporary Constitutional Issues in our Multiparty Democracy hardly remembered for suffering so that we all may achieve democratic dividend. Unless you are a judge or a big Chief who is murdered, you do not deserve any attention. The irony of Re Akoto is that ordinary people had to suffer and die for the case to be claimed by the middle and upper class as an example of how they(the middle and upper class) should not be treated. Whilst berating Re Akoto as one of the very low points of constitutionalism and human rights protection in Ghana, we do not care a biscuit that many persons who are accused of committing offences far less severe than what Re Akoto and the others were alleged to have committed wallow in jail without trial for twice as many years as Re Akoto and the others spent in jail or are serving prisons sentences far disproportionate to the crimes they committed or for simply political reasons. And all this is happening in 2008 and 2009 under democratic constitutional rule and in the face of article 14 of the 1992 Constitution which decries the detention of anyone without trial for an unreasonable length of time no matter what crime she may have committed. Most of them die prematurely in prisons, and nobody hears about them unless they are in the middle or upper class of our society. Lawyers, judges, policymakers and civil society operatives must bow their heads in shame at this state of affairs. When a person dies in prison, the expression used to convey the news is: “ One fowl die ” . When it is a prison officer, the expression is: “ One cow die ” . These expressions are loaded with meaning which I know will not have passed you by. The second observation I would like to make about the Re Akoto Case is the quality of the written submissions by counsel on either side of the case; J. B. Danquah and Geoffrey Bing(Assisted by A.N.E. Amissah). I have read these submissions time and again and tried very hard to meet that standard. I have consistently failed to do so. Of late, I have stopped trying very hard to meet that standard for two reasons; the lawyers on the other side of the cases I do, keep strictly to a narrow consideration of the issues and the judges tend to love that. Trying to meet the Re Akoto standards in terms of the quality of submissions is, therefore, becoming an unnecessary bother and a venture which may actually hurt your clients. The remarkable features of the submissions in the Re Akoto Case were the all roundedness of the approach to the case; the links the lawyers created between the immediate issue of habeas corpus for a couple of guys and broader issues of constitutionalism and governance; and the depth of legal research that went beyond the bounds of Ghana and the bounds of readily available reported cases. The lawyers in the Re Akoto case displayed learning that qualified them for the tile “ learned friends ” . They were clearly abreast with the latest constitutional developments in the United Kingdom, the United States of America and other smaller commonwealth jurisdictions. This is in sharp contrast to the limited and myopic focus of the law that we experience today. Those submissions could only be the product of a broad and sophisticated legal training 7