PROBATION GRANTED

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 152, 23 March 1939, Page 6

PROBATION GRANTED

Writer Of Threatening Letters REPORT FROM DOCTOR The view that certain factors dealing with a temporary injury to the brain would account for an unusual course being adopted during a certain period'was expressed in a doctor’s report on Douglas Maxwell, aged 27, shop assistant and labourer, who appeared before Mr. Justice Blair in the Supreme Court in Wellington yesterday for sentence on four charges of

demanding money with menaces and two charges of threatening to burn down a building. Prisoner was admitted to probation for three years. He is to pay the costs of the prosecution, amounting to £3/19/-. The case had been stood over from last week to enable a report from a neurologist to be obtained. Counsel for Maxwell, Mr. W. L. Rothenberg, said the doctor’s report was favourable as giving some explanation of prisoner’s conduct, and .with that in view, the Court, he submitted, should give him an opportunity to rehabilitate himself. His Honour said there were some features about the case that seemed unexplainable, unless one simply took a motive of some financial stress, or just greed for money: but the need for money was absent. Here was an apparently unexplainable course of conduct adopted by the prisoner over a comparatively short period. Apparently the man he selected was a stranger to him, and the prisoner certainly persisted in the course he had adopted. Had it not been for a certain set of circumstances he might have been successful. The victim of the demand had the wisdom to go to the police, and the prisoner’s object was entirely frustrated.

His Honour said the casejiad caused him some concern because he liked to feel that he had got to the bottom of the particular urge that had actuated a prisoner who, up to that time, had led an unblemished life. Though the prisoner had brought himself within the criminal law, .one had not only to make the punishment fit the crime, but the punishment fit the criminal. In view of the medical report, the case seemed to be one where the benefit of the Probation Act might be successful, and he had. very great hopes that it would be.