Souths fined $400 for rope trap across road

Press, 19 April 1979, Page 5

Souths fined $400 for rope trap across road

Two youths, who became scared and left, the scene when a motor-cyclist hit a rubber rope they had stretched across Lyttelton Street, were each fined $4OO and ordered to pay compensation of $223 each, by Mr N. L. Bradford, S.M., yesterday. Stephen Jeffery Wilson, an auto electrician, aged .19, and Philip Kevin Smitheran, a postman runner, aged 18, each pleaded guilty to setting a trap likely to injure any person with reckless disregard to the safety of others.

Sergeant G. C. Jones said that on the evening of April 8 the two defendants stretched the quarter-inch diameter rubber rope from a lamp-post to a wrought iron fence across Lyttelton Street, two feet above the road surface. A short time later a motor-cyclist travelling west hit the rope. He suffered head and leg

injuries and was in hospital for several hours.

Sergeant Jones said that when the defendants heard the accident from their nearby flat they came out, offered no assistance, and left the scene. Three hours later the youths went to the police station and confessed to setting the trap.

The youths said that they had stretched the rope across the road to see what would happen when a car hit it.

Counsel for Smitheran (Mr A. W. Robinson) said that the offence was a mindless piece of idiocy.

The trap was not conceived out of a deliberate attempt to injure anyone, he said. “It was just a prank.”

Mr Robinson said that Smitheran was extremely remorseful and he had asked to see the motor-cyclist to apologise personally. Counsel for Wilson (Miss M. C. Sheehan) said that her client realised the stupidity of his actions and since publication of his name he had been harassed by his workmates. He was contemplating leaving his job. At the instigation of both defendants’ parents the two had been kept apart since the crime.