Family Integrity #492 — Families Warned Pillow Fight May Be Assault

Family Integrity #492 — Families Warned Pillow Fight May Be Assault

Dear Friends,

Well, now I know what it feels like to be a prophet. At the link below read about the unbelievable case – in New Zealand – where police brought charges against a man and took it all the way to a trial by jury before the judge, in a fit of common sense, threw the case out of his courtroom.

What had the man done? Engaged his nephew in a pillow fight.

I was warning people three years ago that this precise scenario is where tampering with Section 59 would lead us, and now here it is.

https://familyintegrity.org.nz/2009/families-warned-pillow-fight-may-be-assault/

We’ve simply got to keep the pressure on the MPs to take Section 59 back to where it was before. The ACT / Boscawen Bill will entrench this kind of nutty thinking even further. Why? Because the Bill defines UNREASONABLE force – and therefore a criminal use of force – in Subsection 2(b) in this way: “it is inflicted by any weapon, tool, or other implement;”

A pillow, you see, is an implement. So is a wooden spoon. Your hand could well be defined as a tool or an implement…hands of marshal arts experts are already classified as weapons, so yours could be classified as such too in certain circumstances.

So we cannot support that Bill in its present form. Take Section 59 back to the way it was…it was working well.

Regards,

Craig & Barbara Smith

Family Integrity