SIX MONTHS' IMPRISONMENT

Evening Star, Issue 21641, 9 February 1934, Page 8

SIX MONTHS' IMPRISONMENT

WOMAN SENTENCED FOR FORGERY Annie M'Dougall Smith, aged fortyfour, was this morning sentenced to six months’ imprisonment by His Honour Mr Justice Kennedy on seventeen charges of forgery and seventeen charges of uttering. Mr C. J. L. White, who appeared for the accused, said she had a grown-up family of two. She had been before the court on several occasions, but was a hard-working woman who went out to work regularly to keep the house going. For some time she had been in a bad state of health, and evidently had succumbed to temptation. Accused and the complainant, an elderly lady, had been friends for- twentyeight years, and it was when the latter left the accused in charge of her bank book that she gave way to temptation. The old lady, he understood, did not wish to prosecute, but the Post Office rightly insisted on the case being brought. Counsel understood that £lO of the money obtained from the bank had been repaid and that arrangements were being made to pay the balance. The Crown Prosecutor (Mr F. B. Adams) said it had been suggested that temptation had been thrown in the way of accused by her having the bank book, but the fact was that she had to open a box to obtain the book. His Honour said that according to a report before him the prisoner had a comfortable home with her husband and members of her family, yet she took it upon herself by a series of seventeen distinct acts to draw from the Post Office money therein belonging to an old lady of seventy or thereabouts. The acts were mean and despicable, and there seemed in the circumstances nothing to mitigate their nature. The accused had been, and was still, upon probation. His Honour went on to sav that he was extremely reluctant to send any woman to prison, but, distasteful as it was to him, he had no alternative but to impose a term of imprisonment. The sentence of the court was that the accused be imprisoned for six months upon each charge, the sentences to be concurrent.