Liberia: Are The Courts Quietly Stalling The Anti-Corruption Commission’s Cases?

A Margibi County corruption case — backed by a paper trail of prosecutors asking, three separate times, for a trial date — is raising hard questions about whether Liberia’s courts are giving the LACC’s cases a fair shot at trial, or letting them run out the clock.

By Rodney D. Sieh, [email protected]

MONROVIA — Picture a prosecutor who has done everything the law asks. The evidence is gathered, the witnesses are lined up, and three times over as many court terms, someone from the prosecution’s side has written to a judge, on paper, asking for a trial date. And still, no trial happens — not because anyone dropped the ball, but because the docket simply never made room. Then the defendant’s lawyers show up and ask the court to throw the whole case out, because too much time has passed.

That is not hypothetical. It is, according to court filings reviewed for this piece, roughly what has played out in a Margibi County corruption case — and it is the latest in a pattern that has some in Liberia’s anti-corruption community asking a blunter question: is the court system, whether by neglect or by design, making it structurally impossible for the LACC to actually get its cases heard?

Section 18.2 of the Criminal Procedure Law is blunt about what’s supposed to happen when a trial doesn’t start on time. “Unless good cause is shown,” it reads, “a court shall dismiss an indictment if the defendant is not tried during the next succeeding term after the finding of the indictment.” Not “may.” Shall. Once the clock runs out, dismissal is close to automatic.

Nobody serious argues with the principle behind that. A person charged with a crime shouldn’t have to live under that cloud forever while the state drags its feet. But a harder question is creeping into Liberia’s anti-corruption cases: what happens when it isn’t the state dragging its feet at all — when prosecutors keep asking for a court date, in writing, and the court is simply too busy with other matters to give them one?

 A paper trail, not just a pattern

This isn’t the first time the question has come up. In Criminal Court “C” of the First Judicial Circuit in Montserrado County, corruption cases against former NOCAL head Rustolyn Suacoco Dennis and former Bureau of State Enterprises head Arthur Massaquoi reportedly sat untouched for terms at a time while the docket was consumed by the Financial Intelligence Agency’s case against Samuel Tweh and the Finda Bondoo matter. Both cases were eventually dismissed.

What makes the Margibi case different is that it doesn’t rest on “reportedly.” It’s in the file.

The defendants — Patrick Tarnue Worzie, former head of the Liberia Refugee Repatriation and Resettlement Commission, along with Alieu Fofana, Joseph Wea and Jeredine Kolleh — were indicted back in the May 2025 term, in Montserrado County, on charges including economic sabotage, theft of property and tampering with public records. The case moved to the 13th Judicial Circuit in Margibi County in February 2026.

From there, the record tells a fairly clear story

– On May 11, 2026, Margibi County Attorney H. Deddeh Jomah Wilson asked the court, in a formal filing, to put the case on the docket for that term. Everyone was ready, the filing said — the witnesses, the evidence, all of it.
– Two weeks later, on May 25, the LACC’s chief prosecutor, Bobby F. W. Livingstone, wrote directly to the presiding judge with the same request.
– When that term came and went too, Livingstone tried again on August 10, this time addressing a new judge who’d since taken over the case, asking that it finally be prioritized.

Three requests. Three different points in the calendar. And on September 3, with the case still untried, the defense filed to have it dismissed — pointing to five straight terms, from May 2025 through August 2026, in which no trial ever happened.

Read those two facts side by side and the dismissal motion looks less like a case of prosecutorial neglect and more like a test of what “good cause” is supposed to mean when the neglect, if there was any, sat somewhere else.

Why “without prejudice” doesn’t make this a non-issue

It’s worth being precise here. When cases like Massaquoi’s or Dennis’ are dismissed under Section 18.2, it’s typically without prejudice — meaning the state can, in theory, refile. Section 18.3 says as much: a dismissal entered before a jury is sworn, or before evidence starts in a bench trial, doesn’t close the door on prosecution for good.

But “the door isn’t closed” is cold comfort when you consider what it actually costs to get a corruption case to the indictment stage in the first place — months of investigators pulling financial records, tracing transactions, interviewing witnesses, building a paper trail solid enough to survive a courtroom. Refiling doesn’t mean starting from a clean slate at no cost. It means doing a lot of that work over again, on an agency that’s already stretched thin.

And there’s a cost that doesn’t show up in any budget line at all: what the public makes of watching case after case vanish before a single witness testifies.

 What the Supreme Court has already said about this

Liberia’s own case law hints at how this should be handled. In Judge Ware et al. v. Republic of Liberia, the Supreme Court took up Section 18.2 and made a point that’s easy to lose in the mechanical business of counting terms: not every delay is the state’s fault. Where the delay came from legitimate court processes rather than prosecutorial foot-dragging, the Court found, it couldn’t fairly be pinned on the state.

That’s the crux of it. Section 18.2 isn’t supposed to be a stopwatch that runs blind to who caused the delay. It’s supposed to ask why the trial didn’t happen. In the Margibi case, the “why” is sitting right there in three dated letters asking, plainly, for a hearing.

The question this case actually puts to the court

None of this is a case against Section 18.2, or against defendants having a real right to a timely trial. Nobody’s arguing for indictments to hang over people indefinitely.

The argument is narrower than that: when a prosecutor has done the asking — repeatedly, formally, on the record — should the case still fall on the state’s side of the ledger? Or does that record change what “good cause” means?

Uncomfortable Backdrop

There’s a bigger, uncomfortable backdrop to all of this, too. Liberia’s courts are working through crowded dockets with limited capacity, and when a judge has to choose between a corruption trial and, say, a high-profile drug case — as reportedly happened in Margibi, where proceedings against Quita Dolo Kosso occupied the court’s attention during the relevant period — something has to give. That’s not a problem any one judge created, and it’s not one any single ruling will fix. It’s a conversation the judiciary, the Ministry of Justice, the LACC and the Legislature probably need to be having about how cases get prioritized, and what happens to the ones that lose that competition.

For now, though, the immediate question belongs to the 13th Judicial Circuit: does a prosecution that asked for a trial date three times, and never got one, still lose the case on a technicality built to punish the side that didn’t ask?

There is no evidence in the record reviewed here that any judge deliberately set out to sink these cases — congested dockets and competing priorities are a real and separate problem from bad faith, and the two shouldn’t be conflated without proof. But intent may be the wrong thing to fixate on. Whether the courts are working against the LACC on purpose or simply failing it through inertia, the effect on the ground looks the same: cases investigated for months, indictments secured, and then quietly emptied out before a single witness takes the stand. At some point, a pattern repeated enough times stops needing a motive to be a crisis.

An indictment isn’t accountability. A trial that actually happens is. And a system where prosecutors do their part and the case still disappears — dismissed, not because anyone failed to try, but because nobody made time — is a system that owes the public, and the LACC, some answers.