VERDICT OF GUILTY

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 93, 16 October 1940, Page 11

VERDICT OF GUILTY

NEGLIGENT DRIVING CHARGE

After a retirement of about three and a half hours yesterday evening, a Supreme Court jury found Robert Andrew Stow, aged 46, a hotel licensee, guilty of negligently driving a truck on the main road at Taita, thereby causing injury to Leonard King. Mr. Justice Ostler remanded Stow for sentence until tomorrow. The jury acquitted Stow of a charge of being intoxicated while driving the truck.

Mr. C. H. Weston, K.C., and Mr. W. R. Birks conducted the Crown case, and Mr. O. C. Mazengarb appeared for the defence.

The Crown's case, as outlined by Mr. Weston, and supported by evidence, was that Stow, when driving a motortruck north along the main road at Taita at about 11 a.m. on May 12, struck King, who was standing with another man- four feet off the edge of the bitumen. \ King had his back to the truck at the time. He was carried several yards by the truck and fell in a seriously injured condition. The Crown alleged that the bicycle which King was holding was carried further and badly damaged, and that the truck stopped a little further on. A' traffic officer applied tests for intoxication to Stow and he was taken to a police station, and examined by a doctor, who formed the opinion that he was not fit to drive because of having had liquor.

For the defence Mr. Mazengarb said that the crucial question was whether the truck went off the bitumen to its left and struck the man or whether the man moved on to the bitumen at the moment the truck was passing. Although Stow had had some beer earlier in the morning, he was not in any way under the influence of liquor.

Mr. Mazengarb said that Stow had come to Wellington from the Wairarapa to visit his brother-in-law, with whom he had shared two bottles of beer before breakfast. His sister-in-law was in the truck with him on the way back and she had not the slightest idea that he had had any liquor. At Taita they saw two men at the side of the' road and as they passed they felt a slight bump. Stow stopped the truck and went back. He had been on the bitumen all the time and was dumbfounded to find he had come into collision with the man. His only explanation was that the man had made an involuntary inward movement as the truck passed.