As it has been reported at least twice we must suppose it to be true, though remarkable, that magistrate Eddie Yip Chor-man really said no useful purpose would be served by jailing the careless driver who mangled a group of Central pedestrians.
I would not for a moment dispute the truth of this observation. In the days when I hung around magistrates' courts for a living it often seemed to me that no useful purpose was served by sending people to prison.
Indeed, it often seemed that both justice and happiness would have been more abundant if the case had never been brought at all.
Mr Yip is in an unlikely state of agreement with the great anarchist philosopher Prince Peter Kropotkin, who maintained that prisons were 'universities of crime' which caused more misdeeds than they prevented.
This is a perfectly respectable view, though one rarely heard from the local bench.
We can look forward to some innovative sentencing from Mr Yip in future, when he faces one of those hopeless characters, so often found in magistrates courts, who demonstrates his immunity to the reformative effects of prison by repeatedly offending.