McREYNOLDS SENTENCED

Wairarapa Age, 19 May 1936, Page 5

McREYNOLDS SENTENCED

IMPRISONMENT FOR EIGHTEEN MONTHS. NO MOTOR DRIVER’S LICENCE FOR TEN YEARS. WELLINGTON, May 18. Expressing his belief that the prisoner was constitutionally a person who should not be allowed to drive a car, Mr. Justice Blair in the Supreme Court to-day sentenced William McReynolds, aged 28, a ship’s fireman, to eighteen months’ reformative detention, and prohibited him from obtaining a driver’s licence for ten years. Mcßeynolds had been found guilty of negligently driving a car on the Hutt Road near Kaiwarra, thereby causing the deaths of two men. on. a motor cycle with which his car collided.

Mr. M. G. Neal said that Mcßeynolds (tor whom he apepared) was a young man who would live the balance of his life with the knowledge that he had been the cause of the deaths of two persons Moreover, he had already suffered a penalty in that he had seen the dead body of one man. and the other man dying, and had been in custody from shortly after the accident until now.

His Honour said that he would entirely disregard the prisoner’s previous convictions, as they had nothing to do with motor driving. The fact that there had been two deaths instead of one was not an aggravating feature of the offence, which was one of driving a car negligently. The negligence, how ever, was of a fairly gross kind and it seemed to his Honour that it was a ease of shockingly bad driving. There was no possible excuse that he could ,i Jr , th °, aecident - The prisoner had displayed what amounted almost to recklessness and he was driving without proper consideration for other users of the road. He was in charge of a high-powered vehicle which he had borrowed only a short time before and it was quite possible that its .-apabihties for speed were not known to him. In addition he had taken, in his Honour’s judgment, more liquor than w?s goo d for him . The had said that he had had onlv two drinks, but from the way he drove it seem ed that ho must have had more. Also he not only had no driving licence at the time of the accident, but he had never had one.

Im perfectly satisfied,” said his Honour, “that constitutionally he is a person who should never be allowed to drive because he is one of those people who cannot appreciate the righ’s of other people on the road.”—(PA)