DIFFICULT CRIMINAL CASES

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 197, 18 May 1944, Page 6

DIFFICULT CRIMINAL CASES

Need For Institution

“It is very difficult to know what to do in these cases,” said the Chief Justice (Sir Michael Myers) in the Supreme Court, Wellington, yesterday, when sentencing Patrick George Kubler, labourer and carpenter, aged 29, to eight months’ reformative detention for obscene exposure, of which a jury Ibid found him guilty. “I have said more than once that in my view there ought to be some institution which is neither a prison nor a . mental hospital, where people who commit these offences couki be kept and looked after and probably do some work which would be beneficial to the State. “I know that there are difficulties in arranging anything of that kind and that it involves expense; but I am satisfied that sooner or later *%ome such institution will have to be set up. In the meantime there is only one course that the Court can adopt, and that is to senfence you to a term, which in your case will not be a long one, of reformative treatment. It may be. for all I know, that in such a case reformative treatment is a misnomer. I dpn’t know enough of the methods adopted in these cases to say whether that is so or not. I should suspect, however, that it may be a misnomer, but that is the only course the Court can adopt.”