SENTENCES REDUCED

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26634, 3 December 1947, Page 4

SENTENCES REDUCED

BREAKING, ENTERING, AND THEFT COURT OF APPEAL DECISION P.A. WELLINGTON, Dec. 2. On October 2 this year, Mr Justice Blair, at Auckland, sentenced Raymond Jack Callaghan, aged 19, who had pleaded guilty to 45 charges of breaking, entering, and theft, to six yeai’s’ reformative detention. Harold John Varcoe, aged 19, who had pleaded guilty to 44 charges of breaking, entering and theft, to six years’ reformative detention; Jack Raymond Wise, aged 19, who had pleaded guilty to 11 charges of breaking, entering and theft, to four years’ reformative detention: and Deryck Allan Scott, aged 20, who had pleaded guilty to 14 charges of breaking, entering and theft, to four years’ reformative detention. Yesterday the Court of Appeal heard counsel on the appeals against these sentences and to-day the court delivered judgment, reducing the sem tences of Callaghan and Varcoe to two years’ reformative detention and those of Wise and Scott to one year’s reformative detention. The court also, on an appeal against the sentence of John Adair Akehurst, of Nelson, who had pleaded guilty at Nelson to a number of charges of breaking, entering and theft, reduced Ihe sentence of three years’ reformative, detention imposed by Mr Justice Blair at Wellington on September 2 to one I of 18 months’ reformative detention.