The CJA 2009 entered the “terrible twos” this week having come into to force on 25 July 2013. Its birthday gift was the publication of the ‘Second Annual Report of the Chief Coroner to the Lord Chancellor: 2014-2015’, which details the gradual evolution of the Coroner’s Service as a combination of the CJA 2009 and the efforts of the Chief Coroner lead the service (mostly willingly) into the 21st Century.
R (Wiggins) v HM Assistant Coroner Nottinghamshire [2015] EWHC 1658 (Admin), 26.3.2015
With the growing popularity of narrative verdicts in the mid-2000’s it had become common practice for Art 2 inquests to conclude with a lengthy jury narrative outlining a multitude of shortcomings by public bodies. That practice has largely died out: the Court of Appeal’s decision in R (Lewis) v Mid and North Shropshire Coroner [2009] Inquest LR 294 [2010] 1 WLR 1836, and the more recent Chief Coroner’s Guidance no. 17 on conclusions, have significantly curtailed the number of issues that coroners now direct juries to determine at the end of an Art 2 inquest. That there is no longer any duty for non-causative shortcomings to be recorded has led many coroners to only use their power to do so where they require a jury’s assistance to determine disputed facts as a basis for the coroner’s PFD report.
However a looming case might change the practice yet again as permission has recently been given in Wiggins to bring a judicial review claim addressing the question of whether the causation point in Lewis needs to be re-visited in light of the approach adopted to Art 2 liability in Sarjantson v Chief Constable of Humberside [2013] Inquest LR 251, [2014] QB 411.
The sad case of Alvin Bay sets out no new proposition of law, but perhaps leads one to wonder whether there should be some mechanism to allow a Senior Coroner (or even the Chief Coroner) to have a quicker and easier procedure to overturn an inquest conclusion when there is a clear need to do so and no-one is objecting to that action.
In a further court judgment in the long running saga of the investigations of the murder of solicitor Patrick Finucane, Stevens J, in the High Court of Northern Ireland, has held that the decision of the British Government not to hold an public inquiry that could examine the complicity of state agents and employees in his murder was lawful.