Judgment No. CCZ 3/2017 ~ ~onst. Appl~ca~~on No. CCZ 47/15 ,___... ..... ~ •*pplicaLIOn No. CCZ 50/15 ! as they still have at their disposal various other alternative avenues of escape and redress of the alleged prison wrongs. The applicants are seeking to upset the sentences passed by the High Court without alleging, let alone proving, that it erred or was at fault in any way. It seems they want to pre-empt and upset lawful valid sentences purely on the basis of events which occurred after they had been convicted and sentenced. In my view this sounds more of an appeal disguised as a constitutional application. In my considered view events which occur in prison after conviction and sentence are wholly irrelevant to warrant reconsideration of the conviction or sentence by the tria) COUit. Once a court has completed a case it washes its hands and moves forward \Vithout looking back. The iime honoured functus officio and res judicata doctrines militate against the same court revisiting the same completed case except in exceptional circumstances which are absent in this case. If the High CoUit erred in any way, the remedy for those who are yet to appeal resides in the Supreme Cowt and for those who have already lost their appeals, in the invocation ofthe President's prerogative of mercy. It would be a travesty of procedural justice for this court to bypass both the Supreme Court and the President before they have exercised their constitutional mandates to determine the applicable remedies according to the prescribed laws of the land. As we have already seen, in the normal run of things courts are generally loathe to determine a constitutional issue in the face of alternative rem{<i~~T-~~·~t~:'e?t,.t!l~.w<?uld ___ -- - - -- - - ----- -· _1 . CONsr;~;-!';;!~.l ,j.r: .- ---~-~ t -- '-\. . . \_,.:\· 1 27 -1 I I i {-'(_) ,' 1 I ;~~~ I r L - (~" ~~·:,c,ur?J -~- ~_:__ ,~ .; . ! I j I r