Publicity Through the Courts.

Press, Volume LXVII, Issue 20427, 23 December 1931, Page 10

Publicity Through the Courts.

There is a good deal to be said for the correspondent who complains this morning of the hal>it of Government Departments of seeking free publicity through the Courts. To prosecute an innocent offender for no other reason than to draw public attention to a regulation or by-law is seldom necessary and never just, and the community submits to it mainly because it does not think. The case is different with a man who is properly prosecuted but at the reqiiest of the prosecuting Department let off with a warning conviction. Here there is a definite, and deliberate, though not necessarily a very serious, offence, as, for example, when a man rides a bicycle without a lamp while keeping a wary eye for policemen. To prosecute a man who does not know that he is offending—except in the very rare cases when society cannot be protected in any other way - *—is .to make a mockery of the Courts and, where the prosecutor is a Government Department, to make bad blood unnecessarily between the private citizen and the State official.