MURDER CHARGE

Greymouth Evening Star, 14 February 1947, Page 3

MURDER CHARGE

WHANGAREI FARMHAND FOUND GUILTY LIFE IMPRISONMENT (P.A.) AUCKLAND, Feb. 13. A Whangarei farmhand, Reginald Alexander Donaldson, aged 27, was found guilty of the murder of Sydney John Peachey, aged 24, married, and was sentenced to life iipprisonrpent with hard labour by Mr Justice Callan in the Supreme Court to-night. 'The jury retired at 5.40 p.m., and returned with its verdict at 9.30 p.m. Addressing the prisoner, his Honor said: “Yqu have been found guilty of murder, and in accordance with the law, the sentence of the Court is that you be imprisoned and kept at hard labour for the term of your natural life.” Submissions for Defence

Addressing the jury for the defence, Mr R .K. Trimmer invited the jury to treat the accused’s confession with the greatest suspicion. At the time it was made he was in such a state of mental and physical stress that any statement he made was worth nothing. “We say,” said counsel, “that he was a mental weakling and that after January, 1945, when he was turned down by the girl, he became more and more mentally deranged. If by chance he is the man who shot Peachey we say he did not know he was doing wrong.” “If ever there was a carefully planned murder carried out in every detail it was this,” said Mr V. R' Meredith, for the Crown, in his address to the jury. “We have heard the most remarkable defence of this man. They have claimed that Donaldson did not commit the murder, and that if he did, he was insane. They have attempted to blind you with science with their evidence on psychiatry, psychology and criminal law.” Judge’s Summing Up A cold-blooded, deliberate and successful murder was the only way he could describe the shooting of Peachey, said his Honor, in his summing up, which took. a little more than an hour. The accused was anything but an imbecile, and he suggested that only a congenital imbecile could grow up in New Zealand to the age of 20 and not know that murder was wrong.

“It is no defence,” said his Honor, “that this man was so obsessed at the time that he was not thinking about the rightness or wrongness of what he did. No persons who commit murders of passion, jealousy or. revenge ever go through a stage when they ask ‘ls this right what I am about to do?’ Wicked people who give way to their passions just do not have such debates. The accused says, ‘I had to do it,’ but the' law states that even if a person commits a crime on an impulse which he cannot control, it is no defence.” His Honor said the evidence of the doctors called by the defence did not go far enough to give the jury sufficient material on which to decide whether the accused jenew he had done right or wrong. Three courses were open to them. They could convict the accused of murder; they could acquit him .entirely; or they cculd acquit him on the grounds of insanity. Their verdict plainly depended on two questions—Was it clear to them, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the accused was the man who shot Peachey? If they were not satisfied the accused was to be totally acauitted. If on the other hand, they were satisfied- that the accused did kill Peachey, was it established to their reasonable satisfaction that when the accused did it he was by reason of a disease of the mind or imbecility, incapable of knowing that he was doing wrong? It would be quite wrong to assume that merely because a person’s mind was below normal, or even if he was certifiably insane, he was unable to commit a crime, his'Honor added.