Paedophile and former Christian Brothers College teacher Stephen Hamra guilty of second offence involving abuse of two brothers

A FORMER Adelaide teacher awaiting sentencing for abusing a teenage boy over almost a decade has also been found guilty of maintaining a sexual relationship with his first victim’s brother.

Former teacher Stephen John Hamra has been found guilty of sexually abusing two underage brothers.

• Hamra’s first victim: ‘My childhood was destroyed’
• How Hamra challenged attempts to toughen SA’s child sex laws
• Why another sex abuse teacher case prompted those law reforms

A FORMER Adelaide teacher awaiting sentencing for abusing a teenage boy over almost a decade has also been found guilty of maintaining a sexual relationship with his first victim’s brother.

On Monday, ex-Christian Brothers College teacher Stephen John Hamra, 61, appeared in the District Court as Judge Gordon Barrett found him guilty of the offence after a trial without a jury.

Submissions on sentence will be held at a later date.

Last year, Hamra was found guilty of abusing a boy between 1977 and 1986. The victim was not a student at CBC.

But Judge Paul Rice had to delay sentencing because Hamra mounted a constitutional challenge to amended legislation that was passed to ensure paedophiles were sentenced for all their heinous crimes.

In February, Mark Griffin QC, for Hamra, told the court that his client would challenge changes to the Criminal Law Consolidation Act in 2017 that were made in the wake of a bombshell High Court judgment in the Marco Chiro case.

He described the challenge as “untravelled territory” for Judge Rice.

Hamra was a former teacher at Christian Brothers College in Adelaide.

Chiro, a former Norwood Morialta High School teacher, was originally sentenced to 10 years in jail with a non-parole period of six years for the persistent sexual exploitation of a student.

But he successfully appealed to the High Court.

Counsel for Chiro argued that he should not have been sentenced based on allegations of sexual intercourse, but only that he had kissed the young female victim — because the judge had not ascertained from the jury the basis of their finding of guilt.

The kissing was among a range of sexual conduct included in the charge of persistent sexual exploitation of a child.

In the judgment, the High Court agreed with Chiro’s lawyer that he should only have been sentenced for the least serious allegations — two counts of kissing.

He was re-sentenced in the District Court and became eligible for parole last November.

In the wake of the High Court decision, the State Government introduced amendments to ensure convicted paedophiles were sentenced for “the general nature or character of the unlawful sexual acts’’ included in the charge.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recommended the changes before the Chiro judgment.

Mr Griffin said Hamra was tried and found guilty before the amendments were put in place, which would throw into question whether he should be sentenced under the changes.