SUPREME COURT.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 4 February 1925, Page 9

SUPREME COURT.

PALMERSTON NORTH SESSION

ALLEGED INF ANTI CIDE.

(BY TELEGRAPH —PRESS ASSOCIATION.! PALMERSTON N., Feb. 4. True bills were returned in each case presented to the Grand Jury. A presentment was made by the grand jurors on the prevalence of .sexual crime in the district. This his Honor promised to forward to the proper authorities. When Jas. Baxter was arraigned on three' charges of indecently assaulting (boys), the accused pleaded guilty. Consequently he was remanded for sentence.

Eileen Bree was charged that at Otaki on November 14 she did murder her newly-born child. The Crown Prosecutor said that the accused had been employed as a domestic by the occupier of a cottag© on the Otaki beach, and while there had given birth to a child. The next morning the dead body of a male child was found near th© water’s edge.- It was alleged that the child was the accused’s and that she had murdered it. A medical practitioner would testify that the body was that of a healthy, fulltime baby, with fully developed lungs that had breathed; further, that the child died hv exposure, not by drowning.

Constable Satherley, in his evidence, said the accused admitted the birth of a- baby and having taken it down to the beach in a blanket.

Dr. Sharp, cross-examined, said he did not consider the accused was quite normal when under his care following the occurrence. It was also possible that the baby might have died before being placed near the water’s edge. Case proceeding.