SUPREME COURT Not Guilty On Charges Of Theft And Receiving

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31088, 17 June 1966, Page 7

SUPREME COURT Not Guilty On Charges Of Theft And Receiving

Accepting a defence submission that there were too many doubts in the case, a jury in the Supreme Court yesterday acquitted Peter Kaimoana, aged 25, a carpenter, on charges of theft and receiving stolen goods. Kaimoana had been charged with the theft of bedding, clothing, and a guitar, valued in total at £l2, after a party in a Lichfield street flat on February 19— and, alternatively, with receiving the articles, knowing them to have been stolen. Defended by Mr L. M. O’Reilly, he pleaded not guilty on both counts. Mr Justice Wilson, on the jury’s verdict—given after three hours’ deliberation—ordered Kaimoana to be discharged.

Four days after the Lichfield street party, most of the missing goods were found in Kaimoana’s room in a house in Acton street (off Montreal street), according to evidence given. Joseph Riley Grace and Dean Whare, both railway workers, identified the articles as their property. Detective-Sergeant P. J. O'Donovan described a search of the Acton street house, and his finding of a guitar in Kaimoana’s room. After it had been identified, and Kaimoana had been asked about the other missing property, he had produced four blankets, saying: “I told the not to leave them here.” Kaimoana, however, had declined to say who this person was. “Significant Remark” “I suggest that that was a most significant remark, and really clearly indicates the accused’s state of mind at the time the thief, whoever he might have been, brought those things to the Acton street house,” said the Crown Prosecutor (Mr C. M. Roper) to the jury. Mr O’Reilly submitted that far from the usual conflict of evidence, there was an absence of it. “There are too many unanswered questions in this case, and you must have too many grave doubts,” he said. Kaimoana had said: “I told the not to leave them here”—and if the jury accepted that explanation, Kaimoana was not the thief. But there was still no evidence that he knew the goods were stolen when they had been dumped at his house, Mr O’Reilly said. And there was no evidence that the goods had really been stolen,

■ and not merely taken as a , joke, as one complainant at first thought. His Honour, in summing up, said that juries were entitled, in the exercise of their common sense, to infer theft from the fact that an accused had been found in possession ; of recently-stolen property, if he gave no satisfactory exi planation. “But in this case, . I would hesitate very long I before you find this man ■ guilty of theft,” his Honour said.