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A NOMINEE for the position of Deputy Attorney-General and Minister for Justice, Mr. Anthony Kwame Gyambiby, was yesterday grilled for two hours by the Appointments Committee of Parliament. The other nominee, who was scrutinized thoroughly on his curriculum vitae, was the deputy minister-designate for the Ministry of Lands, Forestry and Natural Resources, Mr. Kwadwo Owusu Agyeman. Mr. Gyambiby told the Appointments Committee that an Attorney-General could not take a decision which should be binding on the government without express instructions from the latter. The nominee likened the relationship between the Attorney-General and government to a lawyer and his client. According to him, under such a relationship, the lawyer could only execute a decision under an express instruction from his client. His submission was said to be a slap in the face of former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Betty Mould-Iddrisu, who as the principal legal adviser to government, unilaterally negotiated judgment debts including the �94 million given to Construction Pioneers (CP). Mr. Gyambiby, who until May 30, 2012, was a Chief state attorney at the Attorney-General�s Department, emphasized that if a client did not expressly instruct his lawyer to execute a decision, the latter could not unilaterally do so. The committee reminded the deputy minister-designate about the cases the government had lost, attributing the phenomenon to government�s packaging of political cases and presenting them as criminal cases. But Mr. Gyambiby disagreed, stating that government�s losing of cases was not a new phenomenon in the country, attributing such occurrence to a number of factors such as prosecution rushing to court when all the facts were not gathered. The nominee told the committee that he was personally against capital punishment given its inability to so far curb the instances of murder in the country. Capital punishment, he said, had been in existence for so long, yet it had not been able to curb crime in the country. For him therefore, capital punishment should be scrapped.