Fined £l50 For Attempt To Defeat Justice

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31135, 11 August 1966, Page 9

Fined £l50 For Attempt To Defeat Justice

For an attempt to defeat the course of justice, of which he was convicted in the Supreme Court last week. Gregory Joseph Kane, aged 45, a company director, was fined £l5O by Mr Justice Macarthur yesterday. Kane (Mr P. T. Mahon) was found guilty by a jury after a two-day trial —but notice of appeal against his conviction has already been lodged. The Crown had charged that Kane, who is the proprietor of a Sydenham boardinghouse, had instructed two 17-year-old youths to give the police a false account of a fight that occurred there on April 17, in which a third youth. Clive Bruce Topping was stabbed. Although Kane’s offence was serious, the public interest did not demand his imprisonment, when ail the circumstances of the case were considered, said his Honour, in passing sentence. Kane was a first offender,; with an otherwise good per-' sonal record, who seemed to have acted on the spur of the moment so that, fortunately, the truth soon came out. Mr Mahon, on behalf of Kane, had submitted that it had not been the normal type

of such a case coming before the Court, where the accused person was involved in some criminal act, and had tried to avoid the consequences. Kane had been a bystander at the fight—which he had tried to stop—and had later got involved in the rights and wrongs of it. It could also have been that Kane was trying to protect the weaker youth in the fight.