4 HH 547-23 CA 480/19 of the late President had been edited or photo shopped. He confirmed that photo shopping exists and describe it as a process whereby a photograph or a video is edited to show or add characters, pictures or features which were not in the original video or picture. He confirmed the violent protests by the MDC Alliance of the 1st day of August, 2013. The State the closed its case after calling the two witnesses whose evidence is summarised above. The appellant then gave evidence in his defence. He repeated his assertions in the defence outline. He denied saying the words attributed to him and claimed that the video produced in court had been ‘doctored’ by security agents to nail him for political reasons. He urged the court to reject the video evidence because it was not credible in the absence of any audience as part of the video and evidence regarding who had uploaded it onto the internet. At the end of the trial the appellant was convicted and sentenced to imprisonment for (3) years of which one (1) year was suspended for five years on condition of good behavior. In its reasons for judgment the court made the following findings. The second state witness had conceded that it was possible for a video recording to be tempered with. He had also conceded that he (the state expert) could not dispute that the video was susceptible to alteration before being uploaded to YouTube. Having observed as above, the court still found that the video produced in court was authentic and credible and therefore safe to rely on. It said it had taken into account all the attendant circumstances of the case. The video had been uploaded on the 31 July, 2023. The appellant had not disputed that he was the person appearing in the video. He was, indeed, at the HICC as the MDC Alliance election observer on the day in. It was satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the appellant’s utterances were inflammatory. The court accepted that there was no direct evidence linking the utterances in the video with the civil protests that took place on the 1st August, 2018. It however, concluded that there was a real likelihood that the publication of the video through the social media had instigated the political violence which erupted on the 1st August, 2018. The appellant was aggrieved by the outcome whereupon he appealed in person against both conviction and sentence on the 25 July, 2019. He later amended the grounds of appeal through his legal practitioner on the 8 August, 2019. He replaced all his initial grounds of appeal with new ones. The grounds of appeal against conviction, as amended, now read as follows: -