MAGISTERIAL AMENITIES IN MOTUEKA.

Colonist, Volume IX, Issue 855, 9 January 1866, Page 3

MAGISTERIAL AMENITIES IN MOTUEKA.

If to be " a terror unto evil doers, and a praise of such as do well," be a condition aspired .to by all the gentlemen whose names adorn the Commission of the Peace in NewZealand, the accuracy of the rule is certified by the exceptions which our report of the last Magistrates' Court at Motueka discloses to public view. There, on last Court day, was witnessed the edifying spectacle of two persons whom Her Majesty's-Representa-tive in the colony has empowered to attach "Justice of the' Peace" to their respective names, and to dispense Justices' Justice from the Bench, employing towards each other opprobrious epithets and accusations, which astonished the occupants of the little Court House, and even disgusted the friends of the erring magistrates. There is a grim humor in the circumstances of Messrs. Wright and Horneman, Justices of the Peace, Captain and ex-Captain, first calmly taking their seats on the judicial bench ; descending therefrom, taking their places at the bar as complainant and defendant, roundly abusing each other thereat; and then, after behaving in a manner that some decent men would feel to be a disgrace to them, quietly re seating themselves on the Bench to dispense justice to others, in presence of those people whom their conduct had outraged.- "We deem ib incumbent on us to notice these things, and we hope Governor Grey will see fit to make inquiry into the circumstances, and to consider whether it is fitting that men should sit as administrators of the law, who are capable of so demeaning themselves in that Court of which they profess to be rulers. There are two strange decisions reported in the proceedings, and they show a new system of logic on the part of the Chairman, fc. Dutton, who gives judgment sometimes as if he formed the entire bench. The idea of taking up the possibility of a case which had not come before the Court, and might never come: of advising as it were the contingent complainant in such a case, and giving information as to what would be the decision in this hypothetical action, is a rule in law which we suppose is known only to Motueka.- And after telling the complainant in the case with which the Court had to deal, that he was entitled to judgment, and then pressing him to withdraw his case, is a "judgmatical" proceeding to which Mr. Dutton would have some difficulty in finding a parallel—even in the history of his English experience as a lawyer. Mr. Dutton, we know, entertains some rare notions on the questions of impounding and cattle trespass, but a rarer decision than that in the case of Wildeman v. Inwood we never met with in our legal reading. A defendant admitted owing a balance of a just

debt, one-half of which he had paid, and for the unpaid moiety he had been summoned. The debt was confessed, and by jail law and practice judgment and costs ought to have followed. But Mr. Dutton must needs import his crotchet on the Impounding Act here, and tell the man that he should have brought his action under that Act, andthere T fore he could not give him costs ; ancl this too wtiile ordering the defendant to pay the amount for which he was summoned. Surely Mr. Dutton's experience in the practice of the legal profession in England ought to have told him that au action for damages to property lies at common law and in equity, irrespective of all the Impounding Acts that were ever misunderstood and perverted by a Chairman of Justices; and that therefore the complainant had not. taken a wrong remedy; but, was as much entitled to his costs, as to the amount sued for. Looking at these decisions, we can understand the covert, sarcasm that must have lurked under Mr. Maciualion's question, put to Mr. Dutton at the election meeting last Saturday night, regarding the establishment of Courts of Arbitration. If these be samples of Justices' law at Motueka, preserve us from such lawgivers.