PRIZE FIGHTING.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 91, 3 September 1912, Page 5

PRIZE FIGHTING.

THE ETHTCS OF "STOUSH." .By Telegraph—Pross Association. Hamilton, Last Night. In the course of liis address to the Grand Jury to-day. Judge Cooper made an important referenee to prize fighting, when speaking of the. ease against a young man named Moore, charged with the manslaughter of a Maori named Taupii'i, as a result of a bare knuckle light for a wager, and who subsequently died. His Honor said that prize fights were unlawful in common law, and were rendered unlawful by Statute in New Zealand, and it was a definite criminal offence for anyone to take part in a prize fight. The law on the matter was definite. He considered it of such importance that he had decided to put his opinions on the matter in writing. Judge Cooper then read as follows: "When one person is indicted for inflicting personal injury upon another, the consent of the person who sustained injury is no defence to the person who inflicts the injury if the injury was of such a nature, or is inflicted under such circumstances, that its infliction is injurious to the public as well as to the person injured. Both injuries given and received in prize fights are injurious to the public, both because it is against the public interests that the lives and health of combatants should be endangered by blows, and because prize fights are disorderly exhibitions and mischievous on many obvious grounds. Therefore, the consent of parties to blows which they mutually receive does not prevent those blows from being assaults, and in my opinion this principle of law is not confined to prize fights, for every fight in which the object and interest of each of the combatants is to subdue the other by violent Wows is, or has, a direct tendency to a breach of the peace, and it matters not whether such a fight be a hostile fight begun or continued in anger, or a prize light for a money or nther advantage.