A good friend of my father's once told me the one place you never want to find yourself dragged into is the jury box. "Particularly if it's a coroner's jury", he said, continuing "because the lawyers there all think they're Perry Mason"
Well if Gordon Brown has things his way (and that's what seems to happen these days) I might never get to find out. Because Gordy is deeply unhappy at the way the Coroner can bring in a jury to hold a fairly public review of how someone met their end.
It would seem he is manouvering his artillery to arrange a situation where 'certain inquests' would be held in private, without a jury, and he presided over by a particular official.
Well, I can certainly see why he might want to do that. I mean, the inquest into how Diana and Dodi met their end is probably a prime example of one inquest he'd like to quosh. Mainly because it reveals that christ knows how long after she met her end she's STILL more popular than him. But there are a few more cases I can think of.
For a start, there's
this story. Tony Collins' book "Open verdict" ISBN 0-7474-0146-2 is an interesting read.
And any minute now there is going to be an unholy row over the revelations that servicemen "volunteering" for a cure into the common cold were sent to places like Christmas Island, where the LD50 for nuclear radiation of the cold virus AND the man hosting it was measured. Again, not something I'd want dragged into the public glare by "News At Ten"
But the coroner has not always been this public spirited.
A man I knew professionally from my previous line of work has carried out a detailed study of the office, for both research and literary purposes. The 'hero' of his fictional novels is a holder of the original office of state that became the coroner. And his main job seems to be to determine whether the Norman coffers can be further swelled by amercements (that's fines to you and me) levied upon saxon vilages in which persons not proven to be saxon, and not proven to be foreigners, were found dead. The idea being that the Norman Conquerors, strapped for cash, declared that any corpse NOT foprmally identified as SAXON or FOREIGN would be presumed NORMAN and would therefore be presumed to have been murdered by the nearest saxon villagers. And would therefore be "amerced" the "murdrum fine" for their misdeeds.
The principle that a man is guilty until proven innocent was of course gleefully seized upon by the people now known as Her Majesty's Revenue And Customs who have applied the principle from Mediaeval times and continue to do so to this day.
But guess what. The Metropolitan Police can't stand the current coroners system either. A google search will turn up a summary of a most scathing attack on the coroner's court system, published on a website 'Metline.co.uk' in September 2005. This was the online presence of the Metropolitan Police Federation, who have moved to
The "less commercial sounding" www.metFED.ORG.uk Clicking the old link now gets you a '404 Not Found' message as the Met has (once again, some might say ?) succeeded in removing the evidence of its actions from public view. But they forgot that gogle has
a cache and in there you can find these words :-
Coroners' courts began in Norman times. Now their modernisation is dangerously overdue. Almost exactly 30 years ago, a coroner's jury returned a verdict which shook the English legal establishment. The six men and three women sitting at Westminster Coroner's Court decided that 29-year-old Sandra Rivett – who, prior to being battered to death, had been working as a nanny in Belgravia – had been murdered.
So far, so good. But the jury didn't stop there. They went on to name the man who, they decided, was the murderer - Miss Rivett's employer, Lord Lucan.
Westminster Coroner Dr Gavin Thurston immediately issued a warrant committing the peer for trial at the Central Criminal Court, while the Met's Det Ch Supt Roy Ranson assured the press that his team was still looking for Lord Lucan “all over the world”.
They needn't have bothered with the warrant or the search – not because Lord Lucan was never found but because, even if he had been unearthed and transported to the Bailey, he would almost certainly have walked. For how, as aghast lawyers pointed out, could one jury – in a criminal court – exercise a presumption of innocence on the part of the defendant when another jury – in a coroner's court – had already found him guilty?
Which meant there would have been one lucky, and probably murderous, lord on the loose.
English lawmakers moved with uncharacteristic speed to ensure that never again could a coroner's court screw things up on this scale. The Criminal Law Act 1977 outlawed the practice of apportioning guilt at inquests.
And yet the coroner's court system continues to cast a baleful influence on the criminal justice machine, as Metropolitan Police officers have found to their cost.
Once again, this has been brought into sharp and frightening focus by the Harry Stanley case. A coroner's court has been pivotal in the half decade-plus that Neil Sharman and Kevin Fagan have had, inhumanly, to spend on the legal rack. This court has conducted two inquests into the death of Harry Stanley. The two respective juries, under the guidance of the coroner, returned two different verdicts. Both verdicts were overturned by the High Court upon judicial review. The cost in human terms of this fiasco has been high, in the form of gnawing uncertainty for Neil, Kevin and their families. And as we know, their nightmare goes on.
This is far from being an isolated case. The Roger Sylvester case, for example, also involved a coroner's court verdict which was subsequently overturned in the High Court.
It shouldn't be like this. And it needn't be. The Government has in front of it a blueprint to overhaul these living legal fossils – coroner's courts date back to the days of the Norman conquest – to ensure they do not undertake quasi-judicial proceedings for which they are totally unsuited. Four years ago, Home Office Minister Beverly Hughes ordered a review of coroner's services in England and Wales. In April 2003, a team headed by Tom Luce, who is a former Head of Social Care Policy at the Department of Health, presented its report, which recommended widespread reform to make the system relevant for the 21st century.
The Luce report was given an apparently enthusiastic welcome by the Home Office, where Minister Paul Goggins admitted: “The coroner system has long laboured under outdated legal provisions which were never designed to meet the demands of today's society.
“The shortcomings within the current system have become increasingly evident and it is essential that we build an effective, supportive and transparent system that commands public confidence.”
But now, two years later, coroner's courts remain untouched by any of the Luce report's recommendations, with grim implications for officers nationwide if they find themselves in a similar position to Kevin Fagan and Neil Sharman. The report underscores the difficulties which are caused by the short-form verdicts which coroner's juries return - for example: 'accidental death', 'misadventure' 'open' and, of course, 'lawful/unlawful killing'. The latter is described in the report as “problematic” and the authors put their finger straight on the nub of the difficulty.
The report explains: “It is the business of the criminal justice system to decide what is murder or manslaughter. “The process of criminal investigation and trial are more suited to that purpose than any process achievable in the coroner's court. “The coroner's court does not have the same rules of evidence or provide the protections against wrongful incrimination required inter alia by the European Convention on Human Rights.”
One of the Coroners' Rules - which govern the conduct of coroners' courts - stipulates that: “No verdict shall be framed in such a way as to appear to determine any question of... criminal liability on the part of a named person...” (this is the hangover from the Rivett inquest). And yet, in a case like that of Harry Stanley, in which the names of the officers who shot him are not in dispute, how could a verdict of unlawful killing, which was returned (wrongly, according to the High Court) by the jury in the second inquest, fail to point the legal finger at 'a named person' - or, in this case, two.
But the report notes: “If the coroner, mindful of the care shown in the civil and criminal justice systems to protect all parties from casual incrimination or imputations of liability, steers the proceedings away from 'unlawful killing', the family [of a deceased relation] is likely to feel that the system has offered them a glimpse of a meaningful outcome but then made it virtually unattainable. “This is to design conflict and disappointment into the system.” The short-form verdict is also a magnet for media attention, the report points out.
The Luce report therefore proposes doing away with these verdicts and recommends that the outcome of any inquest should be broadly confined to a report describing the cause and circumstances of the death. It agrees that deaths need to be classified for statistical purposes but says that this is best done by using a new 'category system'. These categories would merely described the type of death which had occurred, such as 'industrial disease', 'traumatic death in the workplace', 'traumatic death at the hand of one or more people' or 'unascertained'.
The report stresses that these would not be replacements for verdicts and would be used for administration purposes only. Another important area where the report urges overhaul concerns the type of qualification for the job which a coroner should hold. At present, many coroners have a legal qualification but some have a medical one. The report says that, in future, a legal qualification must be mandatory to ensure that the investigative and judicial work which the job involves is handled efficiently. It believes, in fact, that the post requires at least five years' experience as a practising solicitor or barrister as a minimum requirement.
It also recommends that, for the first time, coroners be given formal training, both initial and on-going. As it points out, coroners are, incredibly, the only people involved in a judicial function in England and Wales who receive no such training. And it says that coroners trying complex cases should be given professional legal help. Some coroners, it explains, “have found themselves at, or, perhaps, beyond, the limits of their capacity to fulfil all the roles demanded of them to the judicial standards expected by the modern public”. To avoid this, coroners should be able to appoint a lawyer to act as Counsel to the inquest, the report recommends. The lawyer's job would be to help to choose and prepare the evidence to be brought into court, lead the questioning of witnesses, summarise the evidence and list the possible outcome options.
Very complicated or contentious cases should be taken out of the coroners' hands completely, the report adds. Instead, a number of circuit judges should be suitably trained to conduct them. In exceptional cases, inquests should be sent to a High Court judge.
In a letter to the Home Office, published with the report, Tom Luce and his panel note that they are not the first to conduct reviews of the coronial system. Similar exercises were carried out, on government orders, in 1936 and 1965. “Very little happened in response to their reports,” they say. “The (coroners) services are showing the consequence of this neglect. We, and those whom we have consulted, hope that the inaction will not continue.”
