Serial killer fights to gain access to gay pornography

The serial killer Dennis Nilsen is seeking extra legal aid so he can challenge a ban on receiving homosexual pornography in prison.

Nilsen claims he is the victim of a policy that discriminates against gay inmates because his chosen magazine is prohibited under prison rules. His lawyers argue that, while images of erect penises are banned, pictures of "obvious and explicit arousal of women" in heterosexual magazines are permitted.

Flo Krause, Nilsen's counsel, said this policy breached the Human Rights Act.

Heterosexual soft porn publications such as Escort and Razzle were widely circulated among other prisoners at Whitemoor high security jail in Cambridgeshire, she added.

But Nilsen's choice, the magazine Vulcan, was banned under prison rules restricting the type of pictorial images allowed.

In written submissions to the High Court, Ms Krause said an art book by gay artists Pierre et Gilles was being withheld from Nilsen.

To deprive him of access to the book was "inhuman and degrading" treatment of a man who would spend the rest of his life as a Category A inmate.

"The fact of imprisonment does not eradicate one's sexuality," she argued. "To deny the claimant expression of his sexuality because it is of a homosexual nature is cruel and made more so by the fact that he will never have the opportunity, so long as this stance is maintained, to have access to materials which enable him to express his sexuality."

Some issues of Vulcan had been completely withheld, while others had been given to Nilsen with pages torn out.

Yesterday, Nilsen's solicitor, Nick Wells, confirmed his client had been granted legal aid to pursue a High Court application in relation to his biography.

But he said the secondary issue of access to magazines would now be the subject of a separate hearing and would, therefore, need a separate application for legal aid.

The discrimination claim was made public at the same time as Nilsen won the right to challenge the ban on the publication of his autobiography.

Mr Justice Elias gave Nilsen the go-ahead yesterday to seek a judicial review of the prison governor's insistence that his manuscript must be inspected by the prison authorities before they decide whether it can be returned to him.

Nilsen, 54, wants to publish his book, Nilsen: History of a Drowning Man, but says he neither seeks nor will receive any financial reward. Any proceeds would go to charity, he says.

Nilsen was jailed for life in 1983 for killing 12 young men at his home in Muswell Hill, north London. After meeting his often homeless victims in pubs and bars, Nilsen lured them to his home, where he killed them and then carried out bizarre rituals with their bodies.