JUDGE ON FLOGGING

Southland Times, Issue 24874, 14 October 1942, Page 4

JUDGE ON FLOGGING

Abolition A “Lamentable Mistake” (P.A.) WELLINGTON, October 13. After criticizing the Legislature for making a “lamentable mistake”. in abolishing flogging, Mr Justice Blair in the Supreme Court today imposed cumulative sentences of 10 years’ hard labour on a man who had pleaded guilty in the Magistrate’s Court to one charge of incest and one of indecent assault. His Honour said the case was eminently suitable for 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 a man like the prisoner. For incest the law provided a penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment, he said, 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 occasion to prder a flogging in one case, but was himself mainly instrumental in getting that flogging removed from the sentence because of circumstances that later came to his knowledge. “The only other case where I recently had occasion to order floggings was for serious assaults on warders, but the Legislature, after sentence had been imposed, saw fit to alter the law to provide that those men should not have the flogging that they, in my opinion, so richly deserved. That, I think, was a lamentable mistake.” Mr Justice Blair said the present case was one of the most frightfully disgusting cases with which he had had the misfortune to deal.