APPLICATION FAILS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 221, 18 August 1937, Page 9

APPLICATION FAILS.

HABEAS CORPUS WRIT CASE. RESERVED JUDGMENT. Per Press Association. INVERCARGILL, Aug. 17. The application for a writ of habeas corpus made by Mr G. J. Reed to quash the conviction of Eric Clarence Taylor, heard by Mr Justice Kennedy in the Supreme Court yesterday, was disallowed and costs £7 7s given against the applicant. The Crown Prosecutor, or Mr H. J. Macalister, opposed the application. In the course of his reserved judgment to-day, His Honour said: “The first ground for the application was that the warrant was without jurisdiction, and tho final ground was that the proceedings were wholly irregular. On .argument, these grounds were defined in the submission that the tribunal was disqualified by bias and was without jurisdiction. The reason for this submission was stated to be that the learned Magistrate asked a question as to a conviction in his own Court which implied his personal knowledge of a conviction which he had entered at an earlier date. He also showed, it was said, bias and prejudgment in asking a question which elicited a conviction in Dunedin. , Bias is a question of fact. The mere recollection of a judicial officer that he had dealt with an offender at an earlier date is not bias. To put a question as to a conviction in another Court, the question being unexplained but the suggestion being made that the mind of the learned Magistrate was not ‘a tabula rasa,’ as it was suggested it should be, because he had some knowledge probably by reading a newspaper, sufficient to prompt the question is quite inadequate to disclose bias disqualifying him from proceeding upon the inquiry and depriving him of all jurisdiction. The learned Magistrate had no pecuniary interest. He was not judging his own case, and the knowledge or recollection which prompted the questions does not show an interest so substantial, or of such a character, as to be likely to give rise io any reasonable suspicion of bias. In England it has been held on an application for a writ of certiorari that the fact that a Magistrate present on the bench had given evidence in another matter against a person chargedbefore the Court, did not give rise, to a presumption of interest or bias. In the result it appears, that the proceedings from start to finish were within the jurisdiction of the learned Magistrate and the application must fail.”