TERM IN PRISON

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 July 1938, Page 9

TERM IN PRISON

PERIOD AT LARGE COUNTED AS PART JUDGMENT BY THE COURT OF APPEAL. ALTERATION OF LAW NEEDED. (By Telegraph—Press Association.) WELLINGTON, This Day. When an escaped prisoner is recaptured, the period during which he was at large must still be regarded as part of his sentence, according to the Court of Appeal. The judgment of the court on a case laid before it recently to decide this was delivered yesterday. Members of the court suggested that the situation might be thought to require an amendment of the law. Thomas William Wilson was sentenced in 1931 to five years’ hard labour and <?ne year’s reformative detention. Later the same year he escaped and was not rearrested in New Zealand again until 1936, when he was sentenced 12 months’ imprisonment for escaping. The original term would have expired in 1937 had it been served without interruption. The Court of Appeal was asked whether the sentence imposed in 1931 included the period when Wilson.was at liberty. Its answer was affirmative. The Chief Justice (Sir Michael Myers), with whose judgment Mr Justice Johnstone and Mr Justice Kennedy concurred, said that if a prisoner escaped and remained at large for a period he must, if found and arrested, serve the unexpired portion of his sentence as from the date of rearrest, and, in addition, he might be sentenced to a term of imprisonment as punishment for escaping, but nowhere in the books could he find that by the common law the original term of imprisonment was to be extended by the period during which the prisoner was‘at large, nor could he find in any British jurisdiction any case but one in which the question had arisen at common law. That case was a Queensland one. There a felon sentenced to five years’ imprisonment escaped shortly afterward, and after the expiration of the period of sentence was rearrested and committed to Custody on the warrant of a magistrate. It was held by a superior court that he was illegally in custody, though he might be prosecuted for escaping. The court held that the prisoner could not be detained on the ground that he had escaped before the expiration of his sentence, which sentence had since expired. In his Honour’s opinion that judgment was right. The difficulty could be overcome simply, but only by an alteration of the law, which had been done in New South Wales and Canada. “If it is thought that the law is defective, the position can be remedied for the future by legislation on similar lines to that of Canada or New South Wales,” concluded the Chief Justice. In a separate judgment Mr Justice Fair recommended an amendment of the law.