Law_of_Evidence_in_Kenya

The definition above confines corroboration to certain essentials and this brings about the
complexity in issue of corroboration. The judges have struggled to conform to all the essentials
and for some omission or another the cases have been appealed successfully.
3.0 ESSENTIALS OF CORROBORATION EVIDENCE
3.1 Corroboration must come from an independent source.
The following essential is mainly taken to avoid the cases where the person who gives evidence
keeps on supporting it by herself/himself but from different sources but with her/him as the
creator of all. If such can happen then it will cause an injustice to the defence since the person
can fabricate the information which keep corroborating each other. Rex v Whitehead 5 in this
case the accused was charged with having unlawful intercourse with a girl aged 16 years, but she
mentioned the incident first time weeks later when she was pregnant. Lord Hewart C.J rejecting
the argument that such amounted to corroboration stated, “the girl cannot corroborate herself,
otherwise it is only necessary for her to repeat her story some twenty five times, to get twenty
five corroborations of it.” The all argument is that, the victim is the one who made or
communicated such information to be relied upon as corroboration. For the purpose of any rule
of law or practice requiring evidence to be corroborated or regulating the manner in which
uncorroborated evidence is to be treated, a statement rendered admissible by section 35 of this
Act shall not be treated as corroboration of evidence given by the maker of the statement. 6 The
case where the victim shows some kind of distress has been a matter of concern whether it is to
be accepted as an independent source or not. In R V Chauham 7 , in that case the defendant was
charged with indecent assault on a woman. The complainants extricated herself and ran into
lavatory, where she was observed by a fellow employee who had heard her cry. The defendant
admitted that he had been with the complainant but denied any wrong doing and said that the
complainant had been behaving normally. The trial judge left the complaint distress to the jury as
potentially corroboration of her evidence28. On appeal, the court of Appeal went out of it way to
praise the clarity of the judge‟s summing up in this regard and held that he had right to permit the
5 1929 1K.B at page 99
6 Section 32 (2) Evidence Act cap 80 Laws of Kenya
7 [1999 18]7 Ecr APP R 232, Critical Analysis of Corroboration under the Nigerian Law of Evidence by Kareem
Rasheedat Temitope