Sentence Varied On Watch Theft

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31802, 5 October 1968, Page 16

Sentence Varied On Watch Theft

Billy Mummery, aged 42, who had been sentenced in the Magistrate’s Court to nine months imprisonment for stealing 138 watches valued at $4691, had the sentence quashed and replaced with a fine in the Supreme Court yesterday. Imposing the maximum fine of $4OO, Mr Justice Wilson said that what Mummery did was stupid and “falling short of honesty” but that the sentence was both excessive and inappropriate. Imprisonment was not the appropriate punishment, but the crime did call for the maximum fine. Mummery (Mr A. P. C. Tipping) appealed against both conviction and sentence on the charge of stealing the watches, the property of Throwers Jewellers, Ltd, 417 Colombo Street. Mr Tipping submitted that the Magistrate was wrong in holding that Mummery had converted the watches to his own use and that he intended

to permanently deprive the owner of them;

His Honour dismissed 'the appeal against conviction and awarded $75 costs against the appellant He said the Magistrate was right in taking the view that in effect. Mummery had offered to sell the watches back to the man Smith from whom he had acquired them. It was an attempted sale. The Magistrate had also drawn a proper inference in holding that when Mummery proposed to return the watches to Smith he knew he was not returning them to their rightful owner and must have seen that the owner would not get them back unless the police were able to trace them fairly quickly.

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