SERIOUS OFFENCES

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19914, 9 August 1927, Page 7

SERIOUS OFFENCES

TERM OF IMPRISONMENT ACCUSED’S ASSOCIATIONS DURING DETENTION [Per Presr Association.] AUCKLAND, Aug. 8. At the Supreme Court Francis Allen Coburn was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and three years’ preventive detention for serious offences on boys. Mr Julius Hogben counsel for the accused ,said the latter had spent practically the whole of his time since the age of ton as an inmate of Government institutions. These institutions were intended to reform a delinquent or to repair one broken-minded but the accused had learnt only one thing, namely, perverted impulses. At Wcreroa there was an institution designed to reform the delinquent, but where the vicious and subnormal and those who were merely wayward were not segregated, but were congregated in such a way that if it was not a school for crime it was certainly not a reformatory. It was at Wereroa tnat accused learnt sexual perversion, and the practices were more or less common at Tokaanu Mental Hospital Farm, where he spent five or six years. Mr Justice Herdman said that a groat deal of what counsel had said might be true, but he was bound to consider tho public at large and particularly the younger people of the community.