AMMONIA SQUIRT

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 95, 23 April 1931, Page 13

AMMONIA SQUIRT

'DELIBERATE CRIMES"

THREE YEARS WITH, HARD LABOUR

(By Telegraph.—Press Association.) JOUNBDIN, This Day. "These crimes were not a yielding to sudden temptation, but were deliberate, and aceni to mark the culminating point in a long record of delinquency," said Mr. Justice Kennedy in the Supreme Court to-day, in sentencing ■to three years' imprisonment with hard labour Leslie Kichmond Henderson, aged 23, and Leslie Pearco, aged 26, on thirteen charges of breaking, entering, and theft, and using, violence by squirting ammonia in an attempted bank robbery.

Counsol for Pearce stated that from infancy he had shown a marked degree of mental deficiency. He was sentenced to reformative detention in 1926, and on being released joined a whaling ship, where he came in contact with, the, other prisoner. On behalf of Henderson, it was urged that he was an accomplice rather than the principal, and that the ammonia was not directed at the eyes to blind, but at the nose and mouth to stupefy. His Honour remarked that the prisoners appeared callously indifferent to the consequences of using ammonia, for they repeated its uso on the same night.