CASE OF SHOPLIFTING

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 17, 14 October 1927, Page 14

CASE OF SHOPLIFTING

—___o LABOURER SENT TO GAOL. “I brought this mouth organ from a man I didn’t know on the street fot 25.,” said Claude Elicha Miles, a labourer, aged 23, who appeared before Mr. J. H. Salmon, S.M., in the Magistrate’s Court yesterday charged with stealing that instrument, valued at 12s. Gd., the propertv of Charles Begg and Co. Hector McDonald Clark, manager of the general instrument department at Begg’s, said that about 5.15 p.m. on October 10 a man came in to buy an accordeon. He had four or five other men with him, and when witness went downstairs to show him another instrument, the others waited upstairs. The next day witness noticed a mouth organ was missing. Although he could not swear that accused was one of the men. he resembled one of them. “Accused,” said Claude McEwan, a flower hawker, in giving evidence, “met me in the street yesterday and offered to sell me the mouth organ for 3s. 6d. He said he had pinched it from Begg’s. I tried it out and returned it to him.” Accused: “You’re telling a pack of lies, and vou know you are. Y’ou’d swear a man’s death away.” (Laughter.) Detective Robinson stated that Miles told him be had bought the instrument from a man at Perrett’s corner for 2s. The Magistrate: “Is anything known about accused?” Chief Detective Ward: “His last conviction for theft was in 1920, when he was sentenced to two years’ reformative detention. He was fined £2 in Court last Fridav for gambling on the wharf. ~Mr. Salmon: “I must regard tin's as a case of shoplifting. Accused will he sentenced to fourteen days’ imprisonment.”