WHEELS OF JUSTICE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 260, 2 November 1932, Page 7

WHEELS OF JUSTICE.

PROTRACTED SYDNEY TRIAL. EVICTION RIOT CHARGES! FOURTEEN MEN SENT TO PRISON. (From Our Own Correspondent) SYDNEY, October 28. Last Monday (October 24) the trial of 14 men charged in connection with what is known as the Bankstown eviction riots came to an end' at last. In June, 1931, a tenant was to be evicted from a house at Bankstown, and when the police tried to execute the warrant they found the place barricaded and defended with barbed wire. As the occupant explained—"that's to prevent the capitalists from throwing me out of my home." The police were assailed with volleys of stones, and when they rushed the place, the defenders fought with batons and iron bars. One policeman was seriously injured, and another fired a shot, wounding one of the rioters. The while affair caused a great sensation at the time, and at the first trial the 14 accused were convicted. However, on technical grounds a retrial was granted and then the jury disagreed.

This week's trial was the third appearance of the rioters before the Court, and, anticipating trouble, the authorities had provided four complete jury panels —192 jurors in all. The 14 prisoners exercised their right of eight challenges in each case, and as the Crown also challenged 25, and there were some absentees, the panel would have been exhausted if some other jurymen had not been captured and pressed into the service. Judge Thompson, who presided, was certainly less sympathetic in his hearing toward the prisoners than Judge Curlewis had been at the" previous hearing, but their counsel said what he could say on their behalf.

Jury Returns Verdict. The jury was locked up all night, but finally returned a verdict of guilty on all cases, with a general recommendation to mercy.

The judge sentenced them each to 12 months' imprisonment for resisting the police, and six months for obstructing, the sentences to be concurrent. One of the leaders, Eatoek, had been already tried and separately sentenced to 12 months' imprisonment for fracturing a police officer's skull with a stone, and he protested that this was a case of "class suppression." Counsel for the defence argued at length that the men honestly believed that they had a right to resist eviction, apd that violence had been used by the police as well; but he strove in vain to prevent the police from reading the records of the prisoners; and these certainly influenced the judge in pronouncing sentence. Twelve of the 14 prisoners had previous convictions recorded against them, and the police testified that most of them were associated with the Unemployed Workers' movement, a definitely Communist organisation.

Organised by Communists. Eatoek, who received a special penalty for injuring a police inspector, is one of the leaders of the U.W.M., and Ma'karoff, who is only 20 years old, is head of the juvenile section of this same militant organisation. The evidence thus went to show that this disturbance, like most others of the eort, had been organised by professed Communists, and that the root-cause of the trouble was not svmpathv for the hapless tonants who were suffering eviction, but the desire to do something to defy the law and obstruct the course of justice. Under the circumstances it certainly seeing that the rioters, or at least their leaders, got no more punishment than they deserved. fl