Poverty Bay Standard. Published Every Wednesday & Saturday WEDNESDAY' MARCH 2, 1881.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume IX, Issue 922, 2 March 1881, Page 3

Poverty Bay Standard.

Published Every Wednesday & Saturday WEDNESDAY' MARCH 2, 1881.

H3911t0.n0 man Justice orHight;

Our worthy Magistrate was pleased to take occasion on Monday last, while, giving judgment inn, case before him, fo.express his dissent from-.thos# who commented on .the apparent inequality of. different Magistrates’ decisions, and awards of punishment. Mr. PWCE: said rightly, that it was the surrounding circumstances of a crime, qpjte as much, if not more than, the crime itself, that determined a Magistrate to thp amount of punishment to be indicted. We doubt not, that afc , the moment of utterance His Worsbip had in his mind’s eye the many condemnatory opinions expressed by the various press of the colony, on the extremes of punishment awarded recently at Dunedin and, Wellington, and to which we alluded in our last issue. But, with all due deference to My. Price, we entirely differ from him as to the infallibility of even Resident Magistrates. We admit that they do as a rule take thei surrounding circumstances into consider? ation. Bqt there is a rule of; Inverse Proportion, as wpll as a Rule n of Thumb; apd, it is a patent: fact that some Magistrates as often: work their the one process as,/the other. From this category, how ever, we exclude Mr Price, than whom: a more impartial, and painstaking—though at times peculiar—dispenser of judgment we have never seen ; and to his honor we will say, judging from our short experience of him since occupying the Gisborne Magisterial chair, that he would blush as a parent to condemn, on the one hand, a lad of almost infant’s years to the degradation of a gaoler’s lash, and six years’ incarceration, for pilfering apples from, a gardens and he would blush as a man. if not .as a Magistrate, if he went to the other extreme of letting,the robber of a public house till get off with 48 hours’ imprisonment, because he had seen better days. These are the cases Mr. Price referred to. Than Mr. Price there are few colonists who are better able to estimate all the angles of the various characters of men with whom they come in contact; but others must be allowed to know something of these things as well. For ourselves, and the public we desire to represent, and do justice to as faithfully as Mr. Pricer we say that there are no circumstances in this world, we do not mind what crime is committed, that justify a mere stripling, on the threshold 01 his existence, to be so mercilessly chastise! at the hands of some hardened brute — whose joy is proportioned to the writhing of his victim —as would end in hardening him in, rather than leading him gently from, the iron ; grip rof vice; So also do we aver that tor a Magistrate to extenuate a : man’s offence, because he happened to be educated, or that he had, at one time by accident moved in a better circle of society, is, according to Mr. Price’s own dictum, just that- looking at “ surrounding circumstances ’’ by an inverse rule, which is detrimental to the profession to which he -belongs.We do not say that Mr. Price endorses either of the, sentences referred to : Buj; a jeafous regard for the uprightness of his fellow Magistrates’ decisions, naturally evoked expressions leading his hearers to the belief that their apparent disproportionatehess was to be accounted for oh justifiable grounds; and it is merely on those, grounds, which are, held not to be justifiable, thay we beg leave most respectfully, yet emphatically, to. differ from, them.