"NOT A CRIMINAL."

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 284, 30 November 1928, Page 8

"NOT A CRIMINAL."

PERVERT BEFORE COURT. ANXIOUS TO BE CURED. EARNEST APPEAL BY COUNSEL. (By Telegraph.—Own Correspondent.) HAMILTON, this day. When Frederick William Cornford Goucher, aged 29, who earlier in the week had pleaded guilty to five charges of indecent assault on a boy, came up for sentence before Mr. Justice Blair to-day, Mr. J. F. Strang, in pleading for him, referred to the case as one containing special features. The prisoner, said counsel, was quite unable to control his passions and he was really a sexual invert. He had been a victim of his own vicious habits over a long period «#f years, and at the present time he was a physical and mental wreck. He contended that prisoner's mental weakness was not the result of his habits, but his habits were the outcome of his mental weakness.

Prisoner had a fervent desire to be cured of his malady, and he was willing to submit to any treatment that would give him a reasonable hope of cure. He had told him (counsel) that he would willingly go to gaol for ten years if at 'the end of that time he could come away cured. Mr. Strang made a very earnest appeal on prisoner's behalf, not so much that he should not be sent to gaol, but that he should be subjected to some special attention or treatment calculated to bring about the beneficial result which the man himself so greatly desired. Dr. Hockin, superintendent of the Waikato Hospital, where Goucher worked as a gardener, and in which institution he was for a time a patient, bore out counsel's statement that the prisoner was a mental and physical wreck. Asked if there was any beneficial treatment to which Goucher could be subjected, he expressed the opinion that a surgical operation would be ineffective. Constant work in a healthy occupation, supervised by healthy-minded men, might in the course of time have an alleviating effect. His Honor remarked that he did not consider prisoner a criminal. He was a sick man. He would not sentence him to a term of imprisonment, but would order him reformative detention for a period not exceeding three years. An effort might then be made to get the Mental Hospital Department to consider his case.