The Traditional courts eventually became the primary means of law enforcement in Malawi. In these courts, prosecutors had much greater power than in the parallel High Court system. Two high-profile cases show how the system of traditional courts was manipulated to silence opponents of the Banda government. Perhaps the most flagrant misuse of the Traditional Court system occurred in the trial in 1976 of Albert Muwalo (also known as Albert Muwalo Nqumayo), Secretary General of the Malawi Congress Party and Focus Gwede, Head of the Police Special Branch, on a charge of attempting to assassinate President Banda. Both these men had been closely associated with highly repressive government policies in the 1970s, but the crime they were accused of involved plotting to overthrow that government. Banda had defined plotting to overthrowing the government as merely speaking aloud about it, but there was little evidence that the accused had even done that. The only concrete evidence against the men was their illegal possession of firearms. However, the Traditional Court admitted as evidence three anonymous and unsubstantiated letters that denounced the men, on the basis, “…there is no smoke without fire” and recordings of two telephone conversations about the guns, which did not discuss any plans to use them. In order to establish a motive for the alleged treason, the court considered Muwalo’s possession of photographs of ex-ministers who fled Malawi after the Cabinet Crisis of 1964 and copies of books which the court deemed subversive, although only one was actually banned. The court held that mere possession of the photographs of people who had, “…rebelled against the Malawi government” made the owner a rebel, and owning the books was enough to brand their owner a communist sympathiser. There was even less “evidence” against Gwede, but both men were sentenced to death for treason. Muwalo was hanged, but Gwede received a last minute reprieve and remained in prison until 1993. The case of Orton Chirwa and his wife, Vera, also demonstrated the deficiencies in the system. At the end of their appeal in 1983, the minority of the appellate judges, those that had legal training, questioned the guilty verdict, but were overruled by the majority composed of traditional chiefs. The case itself concerned Chirwa, a barrister and former Minister of Justice until the 1964 Cabinet Crisis. He fled Malawi for Tanzania, where he formed a political party among Malawian exiles. At their trial, the Chirwas claimed that they had been abducted from Zambia in December 1981.