Sentencing Problems

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31076, 3 June 1966, Page 3

Sentencing Problems

CV.Z. Press Association) AUCKLAND, June 2. New Zealand magistrates have urged the Justice Department to call a seminar with representatives of all levels of the Judiciary in New Zealand to discuss problems of sentencing. Mr L. G. H. Sinclair. S.M. who was chairman of the re cent magistrates’ conference in Wellington, said in Auck land today that the conference had agreed there was a need to seek greater consistency in sentencing. Mention was made at the conference of what was beinj

done in England and elsewhere through sentencing institutes or conferences attended by judicial officers. The move to bring about uniformity in sentencing was made after comments In a recent report of the Justice Department that New Zealand courts should act to make sentencing more effective. Wise sentencing, because it sought to control future events and not merely to pass judgment on what had happened, was a difficult task demanding the fullest possible knowledge. The report said an English committee had emphasised that there was a need for greater uniformity in the information given to the courts and that the courts should ; have better information on the

purposes various sentences were designed to achieve and what the sentence did achieve. In many cases, sentences would remain speculative unless related to the results of similar sentences imposed in similar situations in the past. One of the criticisms of present sentencing in New Zealand was that judges and magistrates rarely learned of the effects of sentences they had imposed unless the offender returned to the court. There was no regular procedure to assess whether a sentence had any effect on the criminal.