Paedo fights to go free

NOTORIOUS South Australian paedophile Colin Charles Humphrys will argue he should be released from prison because new laws target him individually, a court has heard.

A three-day Supreme Court hearing scheduled for this month will hear from two forensic psychiatrists as well as Humphrys’ cellmates.

Justice Martin Hinton will then rule whether the laws are constitutional and, if they are, whether they should be used to keep him behind bars. Humphrys, 66, appeared by video link in court yesterday – more than a year after Justice Trish Kelly first cleared him for supervised release.

The new laws – passed after that order – have kept him behind bars, but Humphrys will use the 1995 High Court case of Gregory Wayne Kable to argue they should be struck out. In that case, the court ruled it was unconstitutional to write laws that target a single individual.

The South Australian antipaedophile legislation says Humphrys’ release should be cancelled unless two experts agree he is willing and able to control his sexual urges.

Humphrys has served multiple jail terms for his extensive history of sexual offending, including the abduction and abuse of a boy in the 1990s and the sexual assault of a boy in a toilet block in 2003. He has been indefinitely detained for more than nine years.