WILL CASE

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 178, 29 June 1937, Page 2

WILL CASE

LETTERS TO THE POLICE. NOT USED IN EVIDENCE. Per Press Association. WELLINGTON, June 28. A claim tor privilege lor letters written to the Police Department by Lady Hunter asking for an investigation inlo the treatment of wool and skins on the Porangahau sheep station was upheld by Air Justice *mit l in the Supreme Court to : day and tlie letters, which were put in by Detec-tive-Sergeant Revell as a sealed exhibit on Friday, were returned to the Police Department. The Juuge said it was plain that he was entitled to look at the letters for himself for the purpose of determining whether the public interest re quired that they should not be disclosed. He had looked at them and round that, taken together they could properly be described as the letters o an informer to the police asking tor a police investigation into an alleged crime. In those circumstances the letters seemed to come within the authority of a passage in a judgment of the Court of Appeal which, inter-pret-ed broadly, meant that, excep where the liberty of the subject was involved, complaints .to the police were privileged. This was not a criminal case and as the letters, prima facie, came within the judgment he referred to, he was unable to order their production and they would be handed back to the police. To a question by Mr Weston, the Judge said that if a letter was once privileged even copies could not be produced. “It is paramount in the public interest that any person is entitled to communicate with the police and that the communication is privileged, he added.