PURCHASE OF LIQUOR

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LV, Issue 17061, 20 September 1929, Page 9

PURCHASE OF LIQUOR

BELATED DELIVERY INFORMATION DISMISSED (Per Press Association.) LEVIN, last night., An important judgment affecting the sale and delivery of liquor tvas given by Mr. J. L. Stout, S.M., in the Magistrate’s Court to-day, in' a case in which Richard Watts, secretary of a football club, and Evan Jones, licensee of the Levin Hotel, were charged, the former with being on licensed premises after hours, and the latter with selling liquor and keeping his premises open for such sale during prohibited hours. Watts and paid for a jar of beer in the afternoon, and the barman placed the jar in a cupboard. Watts forgot to call for the beer until the evening, when he was found bv a constable leaving the hotel with the jar under Ins arm, on his way to ft football smoko. The magistrate found that the court was . bound by the English decision in the case Bristow v. Piper (1915), and that the sale was completed by the payment and appropriation of goods during legitimate hours. The informations were, therefore, dismissed. “It is true,” said the magistrate, “that this decision opens a very wide door to evade the provisions of the Licensing Act, but that is n matter for the Legislature, which can dose the door by decreeing that a contract is incomplete until the purchaser takes actual delivery of liquor.