SUPREME COURT.

Evening Post, Volume XV, Issue 156, 6 July 1877, Page 2

SUPREME COURT.

CRIMINAL SITTINGS. This Day. (Before HLs Honor the Chief Justice.) SENTEXCE.

Charles Grey, who had been found guilty yesterday on the first and third counts in the iudictment charging him with having failed to discover property to the trustee in his insolvent estate, was brought up for sentence. Mr. Gordon Allan, who appeared for the defence, stated that he would abandon the points h6 had raised in regard to the case, and leave his client to the mercy of the Court. His Honor observed that perhaps it was as well that the learned counsel had taken such a course, as his mind had been thoroughly made up in the matter. The charge in question was one of the iirst which had been brought up uuder the new Act; it was, in fact, the first case of the kind, he might say, in the colony, and there could be no doubt that the omission to discover to the creditors was a very grave oifenee — dishonest and dishonorable ; and more than that, had been' made penal by an Act of the Legislature. He had been considering over authorities on the subject, and what had been done under similar circumstances >in the mother country, and from all he had seen lie did not think it necessary to pass a very severe sentence, as perhaps the case would be a warning to business people in general that the law in regard to creditors' property should be respected. It was not a charge of concealment, but one of not having discovered to the trustee, and within tho last sixty years such an offence was a hanging matter in England, and now recently the extreme penalty had been fixed at two years' imprisonment with hard labour. It was not, however, his intention to pass such a sentence, as perhaps a lenient punishment might have quite as desirable an effect. The prisoner was then sentenced to two months' imprisonment without hard labour. i THE OCEAN MAIL PERJURY CASE. The case of Alexander Caiman and William Harrison, charged with having committed wilful and corrupt perjury in giving evidence at the Chatham Islands, in the matter of the wreck of the Ocean Mail, by swearing that the log had been hove before the vessel struck, was resumed. The evidence in this case was similar to that already known to our readers, and, having been completed, the jury shortly afterwards brought in a verdict of guilty, and the prisoners were remanded for sentence until Monday next, when the civil sittings "will be opened.