Our Auckland Letter.

Thames Star, Volume XI, Issue 3689, 21 October 1880, Page 2

Our Auckland Letter.

(fbom oub own cobbbspondbnt.)

Auckland, Tuesday.

For some time past oar local 8.M., Mr Barstow, has given some very curioui decisions, but his dictum in a recent case of cutting and wounding has attracted such unfavourable comments that I cannot do better than allude to the matter in detail. Our worthy Resident Magistrate was for the greatest part of his judicial lifetime engaged administering justice io the Bay of Islands district, and he had too much uncontrolled power there, and followed his own sweet will that he can. not quite understand why his law promulgations should even be questioned either by a scholar of one of our Home or Colonial Universities, or an experienced barrister of the Supreme Court. Witl these introductory remarks, I will com mence the details as witnessed by an eye witness in the Police Court when the case of Smith r. Duelberg was investigated i few days back. For startling propositions of law, or foi the introduction of principles which wen known to the Greeks about fire centuries before the Christian era, commend me tc the unprofessional B.M. of Auckland for from the lips of the professional B.M and District Judge no such expressions o law or public morals could have fallen a< came from the unprofessional B.M. I remained for Mr Barstow to exhume th< "lex talionis of two thousand years ago,' and to state from the Bench on Frida] last, in Auckland, the Metropolis of tin North, that a culprit who was brough before him on a clear case of cutting anc wounding was "justified "—mark thi word—in running the blade of a pocke knife an inch deep into the thign,. anc afterwards into the shoulders, of a mai who had struck the deadly assailani simply with his fist. To get a blow in th< face is no doubt provoking, and in placet Other than those possessing British law would be sufficient to warrant the use ol the knife; but in Auckland, and in the nineteenth century, is it possible that ai 8.M., so far from committing the accused for trial upon evidence which was sufficiently dear for that purpose, or even deprecating the use of the weapon, actually encouraged the use of it by stating that he would do the same himself. Great heavens! What is to become of society r This is the Magistrate who would order a boy of tender years to be sent to a common gaol and to be whipped with the degrading and torturing pat for abstracting a few absolutely worthless* crab apples. This is the Magistrate who in the very case in consideration said not only would he commit, on the evidence, 'but had the audacity to tell one of the unfortunate victims of the knife that had he been charged and convicted (as no doubt he would have been) with having struck the knifer, he (the Magistrate) would, without any alternative of fine, have given him a month in Mount Eden gaol. To such intemperate administrators of the law (I will oall it so) conriotion needs little evidence, and impulse supplants justice. It is impossible to conceive how in an English community even though an assault (without any weapon or occasion of fear of life) has been committed, how the use of a knife cr any other such dangerous weapon could have received the judicial sanction, and if a case deserved to be bronght under the eye of the Minister of Justice it is this. Certainly retrenchment has not reached the Bench. The doctor who gave testimony in the case will admit that had the same stab been inflicted slightly either to the right or left of that made it would have almost inevitably severed a main artery, producing, perhaps, death. But to the Magistrate this was "nothing in comparison to the black eye that the assailant had previously received. What will law and order say P Should a blow with the fist be resented with the knife ? If so, then comes the revolver, which would be still more effective. Such a dictum might be sufficiently accurate amongst the whalers of thirty years ago at the Bay of Islands, but surely people in Auckland are a little in advance of the rough and tumble civilization of that early period. If such doctrines are allowed to pass unnoticed, the time will come when we may expect to hear Fijian Joes justified.