A Palmerston North schoolteacher who sexually abused boys over 25 years period was jailed for eight years in the High Court at Palmerston North yesterday.
Derek Leslie Humphreys, 43, who taught at Ross Intermediate School from 1980 until last December, had pleaded guilty to 19 charges of sex offences against boys.
They
included sexual violation, unlawful sexual connection and indecent assault on boys aged 12 to 16.
Justice Warwick Gendall declined a crown request that Humphreys, who had no previous convictions, should be sentenced to preventive detention, which has no mandatory parole limit and no finite release date.
Prosecutor Ben Vanderkolk said preventive detention was appropriate because of the "predatory" nature of Humphreys' offending.
"There is a substantial risk that this prisoner will commit an offence on release from a finite sentence," he said.
The court was told that Humphreys' offending began soon after he enrolled at teachers' college in 1976 and continued until December, when he was arrested after a camping trip to the Wairarapa with three Ross Intermediate students.
The first incident involved a 12-year-old boy, who began to go to Humphreys' house, where he would drink beer.
Humphreys was a student teacher at Ross Intermediate at that stage.
On one such occasion the boy drank so much he became sick and Humphreys put him naked into his own bed.
He then got into bed with the boy and abused him.
Humphreys remained impassive as a further 15 incidents were recounted.
They were all similar. Humphreys would befriend boys in his class and then invite them to his house or to go camping with him.
He would then ply them with alcohol and show them inappropriate videos before assaulting them.
The most recent incidents involved three boys, aged 12 and 13 years, who went on a camping trip with him to Masterton and Castlepoint.
Before arriving at Castlepoint, he provided the boys with alcohol, even taking them into a hotel to play pool and drink beer.
He also bought a deck of cards and condoms.
When they got to the cabin in the Castlepoint camping ground, they proceeded to drink and ended up playing strip poker.
All of them ended up naked and Humphreys abused one of them.
Camping ground staff cleaning the cabin the next morning found condoms and alerted police, who intercepted Humphreys and the boys outside Masterton.
The boys were interviewed and Humphreys' offending was revealed.
The chairman of Ross Intermediate's board of trustees, Keith Klein, said the school was happy that the affair was over, but questioned the length of the sentence.
"It's not really for me to comment but I think the community would have been happier with preventive detention," he said.
"I'm not brave enough to say they don't know what they're doing, but I raised my eyebrows when that guy up north with HIV only got 3 1/2 years."
He was referring to Kaperiere Petera Leef, a teacher at Auckland's Hato Petera College, who was jailed last month on five charges of indecent assault.
- NZPA
A Palmerston North schoolteacher who sexually abused boys over 25 years period was jailed for eight years in the High Court at Palmerston North yesterday.
Derek Leslie Humphreys, 43, who taught at Ross Intermediate School from 1980 until last December, had pleaded guilty to 19 charges of sex offences against boys.
They
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