BOMB SCARE SENTENCE

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32334, 27 June 1970, Page 18

BOMB SCARE SENTENCE

Appeal Fails

“I think perhaps that the learned Magistrate erred in not imposing the maximum penalty, but as that was his decision I won’t alter it,” said Mr Justice Wilson in the Supreme Court yesterday when dismissing an appeal by Mervyn John Harkness, aged 24, an unemployed factory worker, against a sentence of nine months imprisonment imposed on him in the Magistrate's Court.

Harkness (Mr E. T. Higgins) had been sentenced to imprisonment on a charge of wilfully giving a fictitious message over the telephone on April 8 in which he said a bomb had been placed in the gasworks.

His Honour said counsel had drawn attention to the fact that the maximum sentence for the offence was 12 months gaol and that the appellant had been sentenced to a term of nine months. “I think that in point of fact the offence and its maximum penalty were created before people got into the recent habit of using the telephone to create this sort of situation in the community by false bomb scares," said his Honour. “I think it is time that the legislature took into consideration the necessity for increasing the maximum penalty where the telephone is misused in this way to create alarm, and indeed panic, in the community. “For this reason it will be seen that I am not at all persuaded that this sentence was in any way excessive . . . the protection of the public demands that he should be adequately punished,” said his Honour.

Four other appeals against sentence heard by his Honour yesterday were also dismissed. They were: Raymond Neil Forrester, aged 20, a truck driver (Mr S. R. Maling), appealing against a sentence of 18 months imprisonment imposed on him in the Magistrate’s Court on May 7 on a charge of intentionally driving a truck into the side of a car in a manner likely to injure or endanger any person on April 11. Terrance John Bourke, aged 38, a storeman (Mr C. A. McVeigh), appealing against a sentence of two years imprisonment imposed on him in the Magistrate’s Court on a charge of aggravated assault on Robert Charles Gibb on May 3 and two burglary charges on the same date. Richard Stanley Wratten, aged 51, an unemployed freezing worker (Mr K. N. Hampton), appealing against a sentence of 18 months imprisonment imposed on him in the Dunedin Magistrate’s Court on two charges of burglary on April 3 and April 5. Donald Watson Byers, aged 18, a painter, appealing against a sentence of Borstal training imposed on him in the Dunedin Magistrate’s Court on a charge of unlawfully taking a motor-cycle. Byers did not appear.