“AMMONIA” THIEVES

Greymouth Evening Star, 23 April 1931, Page 2

“AMMONIA” THIEVES

THREE YEARS’ HARD LABOUR. [per press association.] — if DUNEDIN, April* 23. ' .“These crimes were not a yielding to sudden temptation, but were deliberate, and seem to 'mark the culminating point in a long record of delinquency,” said Mr Justice Kennedy, in the Supreme Court, in sentencing to three years’ hard labour Leslie Richmond Henderson, 25, and Leslie Pearce, 26, on thirteen charges of breaking, entering and theft, and using violence by squirting ammonia in an attempted bank robbery. Counsel for Pearce stated that from infancy he had shown a marked degree of mental deficiency. He was sentenced to reformative treatment in 1926, and on his release joined a whaling shop, where he came in contact with the prisoner, Henderson. For the latter, it was urged that he was an accomplice rather than a principal, and that the ammonia was not directed at the to blind, but at the nose and mouth, to stupefy. His Honor remarked that the prisoners appeared callously indifferent to the consequences of using ammonia, for they repeated the first attempt on the same night.