TRAFFIC FINES “EXTORTED”

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28766, 11 December 1958, Page 26

TRAFFIC FINES “EXTORTED”

Victims Urged To Go To Gaol (New Zealand Press Association) DUNEDIN, December 10. It might stimulate a spot of timely “rethinking” in the appropriate quarters if everyone convicted for a parking offence in the traffic Court elected to go to prison, as was his democratic right and privilege, for a day or two instead of paying the fine, Mr Robin Cockburn suggested at the Christmas party of the Overseas League last night. The Court would then keep him instead of him keeping the Court. Mr Cockburn came from Edinburgh recently to live •in Dunedin. and is a well-known Scottish journalist and broadcaster. He was critical of “the absurdly high fines and costs extorted by the Magistrate’s Courts on decent people who commit one of the thousand and one trivial traffic offences that it is apparently possible to commit in this country.” The Magistrate’s Court, when traffic cases are being heard, was described as “a casino where the Magistrates are the croupiers who give the chips. But the house always wins.” Mr Cockburn concluded: “Take, for instance, the game I some-, times see grown-up men playing, with chalk on people’s tyres, and the game the victims themselves play when they see them up to this business—a sort of mixture of cat-and-mouse and blind man’s bluff.”