JUDGE SPEAKS OUT

Marlborough Express, Volume LXXVI, Issue 242, 14 October 1942, Page 2

JUDGE SPEAKS OUT

ABOLITION OF FLOGGING. "FRIGHTFULLY DISGUSTING"

P.A.

WELLINGTON, Oct. 13.

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 ten years' hard labour on a man who had pleaded guilty in the Magistrate's Cou^t to one charge of incest and one of indecent assault. His Honour said that the case was eminently suitable for a flogging, but all he could do to a person of that type was to keep him away from his fellow-men for as long as possible — a very inadequate position for men like the prisoner. For incest the law provided a penalty of ten years' imprisonment, said the Judge, 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 he had had occasion to order a flogging in one case, but was himself mainly instrumental for getting that flogging removed from the sentence, because of cireumstances which later came to his knowledge. "The only other case where I recently had occasion to order floggings was in connection with serious assaults on warders, but the Legislature, after the sentence had been imposed, saw fit to alter the law to provide that those men should not have the flogging which they, in my opinion, so richly deserved. That, I think, was a lamentable mistake." Mr Justice Blair said that the present case was one of the rnost frightfuliy disgusting with which he had the misfortune to deal. V