CHARGE DISMISSED

Hokitika Guardian, 21 September 1929, Page 6

CHARGE DISMISSED

SALE AND DELIVERY OF LIQUOR LEVIN, September 19. An important judgment affecting the sale and delivery, of liquor was given by Mr J. Logan Stout, S.M., in the Magistrate’s Court to-day, in the case in which Richard Watts, secretary of a football club, and Evan Jones, licensee of the Levin Hotel, were charged, the former with being on licensed premises after hours and the latter with selling liquor and keeping his premises open for such sale during prohibited hours. Watts purchased and paid 'for a jar of beer in the afternoon, and the barman placed Hie jar in a cupboard. Watts forgot to call for the beer until the evening, when he was found by a constable leaving the hotel with the jar under his arm, on his way to the football club’s smoke concert.

The Magistrate found that the Court was bound by an English decision in the case Bristow v. Piper 1915), and that the sale was completed by the payment for and appropriation of the goods during legitimate hours. The information were therefore dismissed. “It is true,” said the Magistrate, “that this decision opens very wide the door to evade the provisions of the Licensing Acts,, hut that is a matter for the Legislature, who can close the door by decreeing that the contract is incomplete until the purchaser takes actual delivery of the liquor.”