A MAN’S AGE

Greymouth Evening Star, 27 October 1931, Page 10

A MAN’S AGE

FROM LAST BIRTHDAY. Five Judges of the King’s Bench Division —the Lord Chief Justice (Lord Hewart) and Justices Roche, Acton, Hawke, and Humphreys—sat as a Court of Criminal Appeal in London to decide whether a man who has passed his 23rd birthday, but has not yet attained his 24th, can be said to be “23 or under” within the meaning of a phrase in a section of an Act of Parliament, says the “Daily Mail.” The question arose on the appeal of Thomas Chapman against his conviction at Huntingdon Assizes. The appeal was allowed and the conviction quashed.

Mr Alban Gordon, for Chapman, said at the date of the alleged offence Chapman was 23 years and five or six months. Lord Hewart; “Does not a man cease to be 23 the moment he passes into his 24th year?”—“l submit not He is of the age of 23 for a period of 365 days.” “In other words, he is 23 until he is 24?”—“That in so.”

Mr Linton Thorp, for the Crown, submitted that on and after the dy a man passed his 23rd birthday the defence under the section of the Act was no longer open to him. Lord Hewart, quoting from Maxwell, read: “Where an equivocal word or ambiguous sentence leaves a reasonable doubt of its meaning which the canons of interpretation fail to solve, the benefit of the doubt should be given to the subject and against the Legislature.”