Adjudication No. 1160 (March 2002)

The Australian Press Council has dismissed a complaint against a report in The West Australian's 1 December 2001 edition detailing day trips in Perth by a confessed killer detained indefinitely in a psychiatric hospital. In doing so, the Council notes that newspapers have to make editorial decisions in which the public's right to know outweighs an individual's right to privacy. This is one such case given the killer's notoriety.

The killer, Kevin Elliott Kenny, had been found not guilty of wilful murder on the grounds of insanity after confessing to brutally killing two people in 1994.

The Council of Official Visitors, acting on behalf of Kenny, argued that the newspaper had breached the Press Council's principle respecting the privacy and sensibilities of individuals by naming the killer in the report and describing details of his treatment in a Perth psychiatric hospital and of the crime seven years earlier.

The same principle also states that "the right to privacy should not prevent publication of matters of public record or obvious or significant public interest".

The newspaper argued that in this case, "Any consideration of privacy was overwhelmed by the demands of public interest".

It pointed out that the details of the case and the conditions under which the killer was to be confined to the psychiatric hospital were public knowledge and argued that the public had a right to know that a man ordered by the court to be detained for public safety had been allowed into the community "accompanied only by hospital staff, not trained guards".

The Press Council agrees, and also dismisses the complainant's contention that the article breached confidentiality and placed gratuitous emphasis on the killer's disability in the sub-headline "insane man unguarded".

There is no evidence of any confidentiality breach and far from being gratuitous, the reference to the man's mental state was based on the court's decision not to convict him of wilful murder because of insanity and was at the core of the Council seeing the article as dealing with an issue of significant public interest.

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