Some offences ‘not criminal'

Press, 16 August 1978, Page 14

Some offences ‘not criminal '

PA Auckland The Minister of Justice (Mr Thomson) is looking at ways of - dealing with minor offences involving disorderly behaviour so that courts do not have to deal with them as criminal cases. He said that such offences could possibly be better controlled without going through full court proceedings. Mr Thomson told a National Party meeting in the Hunua electorate that although disorderly behaviour could be annoying, there was often difficulty in reaching the conclusion that it was criminal. Much of the difficulty in controlling it arose from this. “While there needs to be some measure of control over disorderly behaviour. whether from the O”er-exuberant or from demonstrators, it may be possible to achieve that goal without recourse to criminal proceedings." To that end. he was investigating the possibility of having minor forms of criminal conduct dealt with by a new procedure that would not require a conviction to be entered.

Mr Thomson said this could be a step towards meeting the objectives of law enforcement and protecting the citizen from a criminal conviction in circumstances where it might not be entirely justified. Speaking to a reporter later, Mr Thomson said the courts were cluttered with a lot of work on minor offences which did not really need to go through full court proceedings. He was anxious to do anything he could to cut down on the workload of the courts. Mr Thomson declined to say what new procedures he had in mind, but he said that a number of options were open in the area between issuing a warning and entering a conviction. He emphasised that any new procedures would deal only with minor offences and not with “any forms of viciousness.” Mr Thomson said legislation was unlikely this year, and the form it took would probably depend partly on the report of the Royal Commission on the

Courts expected this month. He urged those who called for further “law and order” measures to weigh the benefits of stricter laws and penalties against the possible loss of “our most prized freedoms.” “In its crudest form Taw and order’ simply refers to a state of affairs where order is imposed by enacting laws and rigorously enforcing them in any circumstances in which the lawmakers see a need to control behaviour. “In a society where this notion prevails, order may be, and usually is, imposed not only on public behaviour, but also to control morality and the nature and scope of publicdebate. In short, it becomes an epithet for a rig i d 1 y authoritarian society.” In the areas of drug dealing and violent offending there was no difficulty with the proposition that such behaviour should not be tolerated, Mr Thomson said. But he said there were “serious difficulties” in

using the unrefined idea of law and order as a cure for the ills of society. “In setting the maximum penalty for any particular offence, Parliament must weigh the need to protect the public against any tendency that there might be to set a penalty at an oppressively high level. “This is not to say that the element of public protection must be sacrificed to concern for an offender, but there is a point reached where providing harsher penalties will add nothing to the deterrent effect already present in the existing penalty.” One of the “most compelling arguments against the reintrpduction of corporal and capital punishment, leaving aside moral questions, is the fact that studies have show-n that such sentences have no greater deterrent effect than long sentences of imprisonment,” he said. “The reintroduction of corporal and capital punishment w-ould be merely oppressive, giving no greater protection to society than the present law.”

Mr Thomson said that submissions to the Parliamentary committee studying the issue of violent offending showed that it was the result of a complex group of factors — not all of which could be controlled by the threat of punishment. "The bulk of violent offences, it appears, occur when the offender is either under the influence of alcohol or in a state of triind based on rage or frustration, in which case the constraints of the law will mean little to him,’’ Mr Thomson said. If violent offending was simply the result of an offender’s deliberately-cho-sen course of conduct, then there could be justification for increasing the penalties available to the courts. The basis for this increase would be that if the offender thought about what he was going to do, he w'ould also think about the consequences- of detection and punishment. ■‘Unfortunately this explanation of violent offending is far far from accurate,” Mr Thomson said Whatever action the Government took in the area, it must weigh the tendency to increase penalties against, the effectiveness of harsher measures and also against the question of whether the penalty went beyond a matter of deterrence and punishment to one of cruelty and vengeance.