JUDGE GIVES WARNING OF POSSIBLE LIFE TERM FOR RECEIVING

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 22948, 17 May 1949, Page 2

JUDGE GIVES WARNING OF POSSIBLE LIFE TERM FOR RECEIVING

(P.A.) AUCKLAND, May 17. A stern warning to receivers of stolen property that life imprisonment was the penalty the courts were empowered to impose on receivers previously convicted of dishonesty was given by Mr. Justice Callan in the Supreme Court yesterday. The judge passed sentence of four years’ imprisonment with hard labour, to be followed by three years’ reformative detention, on Raymond Francis Woodley Grigg, aged 54, who earlier this month was found guilty by a jury on 14 counts of receiving stolen property. The judge said that m 1933 Grigg was sentenced to two years for conspiring to commit a crime and in 1942 to four years for being in possession of an unlawful instrument with intent to bring about a miscarriage. Leslie James Wedderspoon, aged 33, who had supplied Grigg with some of the stolen property, was declared an habitual criminal and s.ntenced to five years’ imprisonment with hard labour. Mr. Justice Callan said that Wedderspoon had pleaded guilty to 21 criminal affairs ranging over 20 months and the value of the property he had taken was nearly £I2OO. Arrested in Christchurch, where he worked as a steward in the Christchurch Working Men’s Club, Alfred Leonard Sheedy, aged 39, labourer, who was found guilty in Auckland on May 3 on one charge of receiving stolen property was sentenced to three years’ reformative detention.