FLOGGING ORDERED

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 120, 14 February 1935, Page 2

FLOGGING ORDERED

Indecent Assault on Two Young Girls OFFENCES AT PETONE Ordering prisoner to be flogged with 15 strokes of the “cat-o’-nine-tails,” the Chief Justice (Sir Michael Myers) in the Supreme Court, Wellington, yesterday sentenced a middle-aged man, William Thomas Stoneman, labourer, to four years imprisonment with hard labour on each of two charges of indecent assault on two girls aged eight and nine years respectively. The sentences are to be concurrent. Mr. R. Hardie Boys, who appeared for Stoneman, said he had been asked to reiterate that two years ago be was suffering from a nervous breakdown from which he had had recurrences. The Chief Justice said that Stoneman had pleaded guilty to two very serious offences on girls of the tender ages of eight and nine years respectively. He had taken the girls for a stroll, for the ostensible purpose of showing them a shop window in which there was a Santa Claus. He bought them small presents, and then took them into a secluded sport and committed the offences. These could not be regarded in any other than a serious light. “I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that there are some people who think that the court should never inflict corporal punishment,” continued the Chief Justice. Whether or not corporal punishment should remain as a punishment that might be imposed in such cases was a matter for the Legislature and not for him, he said. The Legislature, no doubt, had regard to general public opinion. For himself, lie expressed no opinion. It would not be proper for him to do so. All he could say was that while the law contemplated that in a proper case corporal punishment should be inflicted he would not be doing his duty in his opiniop, if, in a proper case, he refused to order that punishment.