"JUST HAPPENED."

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 40, 16 February 1929, Page 18

"JUST HAPPENED."

ALLEGATIONS OF BOOKMAKING

OOX FOUND NOT GUILTY,

XO VERDICT IN WALSH CASE. (By Telegraph.—Pross Association.) CHRISTCHURCH, this day. The hearing was continued yesterday afternoon in the Supreme Court of the case in which Patrick Walsh and Robert Michael Cox were charged with bookmaking. Cox was further charged with interfering with the working of the telephone in Walsh's house when the police made the raid.

Mr. O'Leary, of Wellington, represented the prisoners.

Further evidence was given on the lines of that given in the Lower Court. No evidence was called for the defence.

His Honor, in summing-up, said the question for the jury to determine was, were Cox and Walsh actually carrying on a bookmaking business, or was the whole performance which followed the police raid merely a bit of masquerade. That was the question that the whole thing "boiled down to."

If they were satisfied that all that material and all that paraphernalia found by the detectives "just happened" to be there; if Cox and Walsh "just happened" to be there in the circumstances found by tho police; if the telephones "just happened" to be in the house; and if Walsh "just happened" to be excited when accosted, then the accused must be acquitted. He urged the jury to take that uncontradicted evidence as a whole, and to ask themselves what were the accused doing there ? If they were satisfied that it was not a business, but just some sort of game, which, his Honor suggested, was incredible, then the accused were entitled to be acquitted. The two men had been found in a house with a great deal of betting material. There was the fact of the two telephones, and of the interference with tho wires, and the subsequent messages about bets on races It was the duty of the jury to discover what this pointed to. Cox was found not guilty. The jury were unable to agree in the case against Walsh. °