Stephen Thomas Hudson is serving a life sentence for killing Nicholas Pike in 2002. Photo / File
Stephen Thomas Hudson is serving a life sentence for killing Nicholas Pike in 2002. Photo / File
A convicted murderer has gone to court to fight for the right to have magazines full of "scantily-clad women" in prison, saying his right to freedom of expression has been breached.
Stephen Thomas Hudson, who is serving a life sentence for killing Nicholas Pike in 2002, took the Attorney-General to the High Court in 2020 after a request to a friend to bring him copies of FHM and Ralph magazines was censored by a Corrections officer.
In January 2018, Hudson submitted a property request form to a Corrections officer in Rimutaka Prison for vetting before the request was sent on to a friend of his in the community. In the request, he asked for an electric fan as well as the two magazines.
The officer who considered the request deleted the reference to the magazines before sending the request on.
When Hudson found out what had happened he laid a complaint and was told the magazines he requested were banned from the prison.
FHM and Ralph are men's lifestyle magazines known for devoting much of their pages to pictures of bikini-clad women and sexually-charged articles such as "best butts" and "steamy foreplay secrets".
The High Court ruled against Hudson, and he is now appealing the decision in the Court of Appeal in Wellington.
FHM magazine, which is no longer printed, devoted most of its pages to scantily-clad women. Photo / File
Lawyer Victoria Casey QC said the matter, despite appearances, was "far from trivial" and dealt with a person's right to "receive information without censorship by the state".
She said the decision to ban the magazines was arbitrary, and that there was a great deal of material not banned in prisons that had similar imagery.
Anyone who regularly watched free-to-air television and music videos could easily see imagery that was essentially the same as what could be found in the magazines, she said.
Casey recognised prison represented a severe loss of freedom and restrictions on rights, and this was something society authorised to protect the public and also punish wrongdoing.
But this meant the minimal entitlements and freedoms prisoners did have were all the more important.
"The boundaries of what society agrees are appropriate for punishment are carefully set out in legislation and they matter," she said.
Both parties agreed the magazines did not meet the legal definition of objectionable material, and it appeared Wellington prisons director Vivien Whelan had decided material was objectionable if she personally objected to it, Casey said.
"We say that she got it wrong . . . 'objectionable' became her value judgment and her decision."
Casey argued the classification of items as objectionable must be confined by the legal definition, and said the lawyers for the Attorney-General took the opposite view, that it came down to a matter of discretion.
