A CONVICTED murderer has lost his campaign to overturn a ban which prevents him returning to his old haunts and watching his favourite football team play at home.

A judge ruled that a chance encounter with released Newcastle killer Stephen Craven could have caused his victim's family emotional trauma.

Mr Justice Stanley Burnton, sitting in London, ruled: "A democratic society should be sensitive to the emotional harm caused to the victims of crime, particularly the most serious of crimes."

Unemployed glazier Craven, now 32, from Heaton, Newcastle, was found guilty in 1991 of murdering teenager Penny Laing in a city nightclub and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The 19-year-old victim, from Annitsford, Northumberland, was killed in the early hours of Christmas Eve 1989 - a murder that provoked revulsion and horror in the North-East.

Craven was released on parole in October last year with conditions that he did not contact her family, or enter Newcastle or North Tyneside without prior approval from his probation officer.

The ban, approved by the Home Secretary, was later varied to include the area around Annitsford but allowing him to visit his parents in Heaton.

His lawyers argued that even the reduced exclusion zone was an unlawful interference with his private and family life under the European Convention of Human Right.

Rejecting the application for a judicial appeal, the judge said the original, wider exclusion zone would have been "unreasonable and disproportionate".

He said: "His inability to watch Newcastle United when they play at home, while regrettable, in the scheme of things is of insufficient weight to lead me to reject the revised exclusion zone."

Craven was convicted of Penny Laing's murder after the jury heard he retaliated to her slap across the face in a nightclub with a pint glass pushed into her face with such force that it severed her jugular vein.

Craven's parents, from Heaton, have vowed to prove he was the victim of mistaken identity.