TIMARU SESSIONS.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXV, Issue LXV, 5 June 1913, Page 5

TIMARU SESSIONS.

AY TELEGHAPH —PRESS ASSOCIATION

TIMARU. June 5. At the Supreme Court criminal session a man charged with breaking into and stealing from the railway parcels office at Timaru was acquitted, the evidence, according to. the Judge, amounting merely to strong suspicion. In the other case a man was accused of wilfully making a false declaration to the Royal Insurance Company of the value of goods destroyed by fire at Mount Somers. His explanation was that the statement was made up by his wife", who bought the articles, and she signed it without looking at it. Her list totalled up to £466, and his policy was for £175. The local agent of the company valued the goods at £220 before the fire, and he saw no reason to reduce it now. In the case of C. H. Besley, for manslaughter, by culpably negligent driving of a motor car, with the result that a postal officer on a bicycle was run into and killed, his Honor said this was a painful case, in which it was impossible not to sympathise with the accused, who was a respectable man against whom there was no suggestion of malice, and who probably had already felt more keenly the consequence of the accident than any punishment that might be inflicte-l. The Grand Jury, however, should not be influenced by that consideration. The grounds of the charge were that the accused was on the wrong side of the road, that his car was insufficiently lighted, and that he did not sound his horn. The Grand Jury found a true bill.