CONVICTED OF RAPE

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 3495, 3 November 1926, Page 6

CONVICTED OF RAPE

SENTENCE OF TEN YEAR’S IMPRISONMENT. FLOGGING ALSO ORDERED. [Per Press Association.] WELLINGTON, Last Night At the Supreme Court to-day, in sentencing John Henry Wall, found guilty of rape, Mr. Justice MacGregor said the prisoner had been found guilty of a crime on a respectable married woman. While prisoner was in Australia he had been convicted of numerous offences. He came to Now Zealand at the end of 1923, and between 1924 and 1D25, was convicted six times ,and finally at Wellington on December 18th 1925, he had been sentenced to twelve months imprisonment with hard labour for horsestealing and theft. After serving nine months of that sentence he was liberated at Auckland by the Prisons Board in license, and made subject to a probation order. He then apparently came direct to Wellington and went to live in a hotel at Pctone, where he evidently took to drink and committed the grave crime of which he now stood convicted. The maximum punishment for rape was imprisonment with hard labour for life, and flogging once, twice, or thrice. His Honour said it was his clear duty to impose a severe penalty for prisoner’s brutal crime. Respectable women had to bo protected from men of prisoner’s type, who w;ero really not fit to be at largo. His Honour sentenced prisoner to imprisonment with hard labour tor ton years, and ordered a flogging of fourteen strokes, to be given on the goal surgeon’s certificate.