EVANS GOT FIVE YEARS EARLIER

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30667, 5 February 1965, Page 1

EVANS GOT FIVE YEARS EARLIER

(New Zealand Brest Association)

AUCKLAND, February 4. Leonard Edwin Evans appeared in the Supreme Court this morning; four hours later he escaped from Auckland Prison.

He was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment on a charge of breaking into the Waihi branch of the National Bank of New Zealand from which he stole £7366.

Mr Justice Moller also sentenced Evans to two other prison terms. All three were to be served concurrently.

His Honour warned Evans that he was abundantly qualified for a sentence of preventive detention.

He said: “On the next occasion you happen to come before this Court, you know, and I warn you now, that you are taking a grave risk of being sentenced to preventive detention.”

Evans appeared tn the Court at 10.5 a.m. and was on his way back to prison soon after 10.15 a|m| Frederick Gillies, one of the three escapers from the prison today, who is at present serving a life sentence for murder, appeared in the Auckland Magistrate's Court last Tuesday accused of assaulting a prison officer.

Gillies, who pleaded not guilty to the charge, was remanded until February 9.

In his submissions on behalf of Evans, counsel, Mr K. Ryan, asked the Court not to give Evans the “accolade of the criminal” by an indeterminate sentence. Mr Ryan said Evans’s was the second worst burglary in New Zealand history, but said that Evans felt he had been cruelly treated when he was given a four-year gaol sentence in the Lower Court for offences for which a cooffender was given only two years.

His Honour said Evans had been sentenced on various charges on October 9 and on November 11 escaped from Waikune Prison, remaining at liberty until November 28. He said that whatever excuse there was in Evans's mind for having escaped there could be no excuse for the burglaries in which he had used gelignite and showed himself to be a competent and experienced safeblower.