INTOXICATED MOTORISTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22618, 5 January 1937, Page 8

INTOXICATED MOTORISTS

The most common complaint in connection with the administration of justice is that there is lack of uniformity throughout the lower Courts of the country in the fixing of penalties for similar offences. Often the critics are strongly partisan and deeply prejudiced in one person's favour. Many others do not possess a judicial sense, and express opinions in spite of their ignorance of the evidence produced in the cases they contrast. Further, they are not qualified to analyse all the complex influences which help to determine the degree of punishment imposed. Nevertheless, it will be generally agreed, even by magistrates themselves, that the personal equation precludes absolute uniformity, and, after all, the main purpose of punishment is not to exact revenge for crime but to serve as a deterrent to others. In the matter of penalties imposed upon intoxicated motordrivers, however, a survey of sentences passed in various Courts during the past few weeks reveals an extraordinary degree of variation. The general conclusion is that stipendiary magistrates, particularly in the cities, have been much more severe than justices of the peace who have occupied the bench. In one country Court a justice, when fining an offender £2O and ordering that his driving licence be cancelled for three years, said: "You should consider yourself very lucky, for if a magistrate had been here you would probably have gone to gaol." This simply meant that a justice who was probably untrained in the law refrained from imposing what he believed would have been the penalty of the trained official. For men who have always been lawabiding there is no comparison between a fine, no matter how heavy, and a prison sentence, yet in the period under review some offenders have escaped with a fine and the cancellation of their licence for a term where others, for very similar breaches of the law, have gone to prison. Steps should be taken.to secure more even justice in this class of offence.