SUPREME COURT Sentence For Burglary Varied On Appeal

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31119, 23 July 1966, Page 20

SUPREME COURT Sentence For Burglary Varied On Appeal

A 19-year-old youth who had said he was 20, and had been imprisoned for three years for burglary, had his sentence varied to Borstal training on appeal to Mr Justice Wilson in the Supreme Court yesterday. The appellant, Russell James Higgins, a workman (Mr L. G. Holder) had committed two burglaries at Rangiora on May 13. His Honour said that but for the information on Higgins’s correct age, and a prison psychologist’s report describing him as “an immature 19”—neither of which had been before the magistrate—he would have dismissed the appeal out of hand. Higgins’s offences, said his Honour, had borne the earmark of a professional burglar, and the magistrate had been absolutely right in imposing a fairly severe sen-

fence on a young man whose age had been given as 20. “Courts Too Lenient” The leniency with which the Courts had treated burglary in the past had encouraged members of the criminal community to think they could commit it with impunity, said his Honour, in dismissing an appeal by Douglas Rangi Cowan, aged 25, a workman. Cowan, who did not appear but made long written submissions, appealed against imprisonment for two years and a half on 10 charges of burglary. He claimed that his offences had stemmed from depression caused by financial worries, and that the value of the goods stolen did not justify the term imposed. “Reformation is a must for me,” he wrote—but it would not take him two years and a half to reform. His Honour said that the number of Cowan’s offences put him in the “professional burglar class,” and his sentence was therefore in no way excessive. Burglary had hitherto been treated too leniently by the Courts. “This appellant is hurt and surprised that he should at last be visited with a sentence which his crime deserves,” his Honour said.