Police officers raided the uncompleted single room at Kasoa Red Top where Ama Forson, a food vendor, lived with her son, and found what they described as marijuana joints, one in an empty bottle by a tree and another in a lady’s handbag.[1] Forson denies owning the handbag and the cannabis, and the search of her room and cooking pots found nothing.[1] Officers handcuffed her and held her at a police station in Weija before moving her to the Kasoa Tollbooth police station, where she spent eight months in a cell.[1] She paid GHS6,000 to three lawyers, each charging GHS2,000, and all three advised her to plead guilty.[1]

In 2016 the Circuit Court in Accra convicted her of possessing narcotics and sentenced her to 11 years in prison, a term she did not understand because the proceedings were in English.[2] She was transferred to the Nsawam medium-security women’s prison after sentencing.[3] At trial the two police prosecution witnesses contradicted themselves under cross-examination about where the cannabis was found.[1] With the POS Foundation, an NGO running an in-prison paralegal programme, she filed an appeal in 2020, and the Nsawam High Court acquitted and discharged her.[1]

One of her lawyers attended the sentencing while the others stopped appearing in court, she told Angel TV.[4] AfrikMag reported that she served four years of that sentence before an appeal cleared her.[3] Her only son died while she was in prison, and she says she lost everything she had.[3] Forson, now 68 and from Nyanyano, told Crime Check TV that after her release her possessions were gone and she has contemplated taking poison.[3]