BREAKING AND ENTERING

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19626, 21 October 1933, Page 3

BREAKING AND ENTERING

RELIEF WORKERS’ SENTENCED. By Telegraph -Press Association AUCKLAND, October 20. “The most effective way in which you could be punished, if the law permitted it, which it does not, would be to order you to be birched, not with the ‘cat,’ but as was the custom 15 or 16 years ago, by a constable,” said Mr Justice Herdman, when three young relief workers came before him for sentence on charges of breaking and entering a hall at Pukemiro. The prisoners were lan Cameron Colquhoun (22), William Dingle (21) and Donald Innes Reach (20). Counsel pleaded for leniency on account of their youth. He said perhaps they had been led astray by others on the relief job. The Judge said young men who were in receipt of charitable aid—and that was what relief pay amounted to—must be taught that when they went to country places they were not free to commit crime to supplement their earnings. Dingle was sentenced to nine months' hard labour: Colquhoun to six months, and Reach was probationed for two years. “You were associated with these boys; you were foreman of the relief gang in which they worked, and you supplied them with their jemmy,” said the Judge to Albert Flewellyn, also charged with breaking and entering. In consideration of Flewellyn’s previous good character, he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment.