A SURPRISING SENTENCE

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 198, 19 May 1936, Page 8

A SURPRISING SENTENCE

It is a little difficult to square the sentence pronounced by Mr. Justice Blair in the Supreme Court at Wellington on Saturday on a man convicted of negligently driving a motor-car on. the Hutt Road and causing the deaths of two people, with the. circumstances of the case and the character of the prisoner. The high figure of road accidents, with many fatalities, demands that exemplary penalties should be imposed upon careless, reckless, or negligent, drivers of motor vehicles. In this instance the prisoner was driving without a license, he had never had a license, and he had a criminal record. The punishment meted out to him for driving negligently and killing two people was eighteen months’ reformative detention, and prohibition from obtaining a driver’s license for ten years. This punishment will seem to most people to be ridiculously inadequate. His Honour expressed the opinion that the prisoner was “constitutionally a person who should not be allowed to drive a car.” But what is there to be said for the moral aspect of an offence committed by a person who drives a high-powered car without a license, and adds to this breach of the law another by having more. liquor in him than was good for him when he took the wheel ? This man, because he had no license, had no right on the road at all. If he had been a law-abiding person he would not have been on the road, and two people would not have been killed as the result of his negligence, which the judge considered had been of “a fairly gross kind.” Every point made by the Bench in pronouncing sentence justified exemplary punishment, and in the public interest it should have been given.