BAN ON FLOGGING

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 20914, 14 October 1942, Page 5

BAN ON FLOGGING

JUDGE HITS OUT ‘LAMENTABLE MISTAKE’ . PARLIAMENT CRITICISED (P.A.) WELLINGTON, this day. After criticising the Legislature for making a “lamentable mistake” in the abolition of flogging, Mr. Justice Blair, in the Supreme Court to-day. imposed a cumulative sentence of 10 years’ hard labour on a man who had pleaded guilty in the Magistrate’s Court to one charge of incest and one of indecent assault. His Honour said the case was eminently suitable for flogging, but all he could do to a person' of'that' type was to keep hurt away from his fellow men for as long as 'possible—a very inadequate position for a mart like the prisoner. For incest the law provided a penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment, said His Honour, and for indecent assault the law used to provide for seven years’ imprisonment and a flogging. In the course of a judicial career of nearly 15 years, lie had occasion to order a flogging in one case, but was himself mainly instrumental’in getting that flogging removed from the sentence 1 because of- circumstances that later came to his knowledge. “The only other case where I recently had occasion to order floggings was in connection with the serious assaults on warders, but the Legislature, after the sentence had been imposed, saw fit lb alter the law to provide that those men should not have a flogging that they, in my opinion, so richly deserved. That, I think, was a lamentable mistake.”

His Honour said the present case was one of the most • frightfully disgusting cases with which lie had had the misfortune to deal.