Senior Coroner for Northamptonshire v Lovell and Teague [2024] EWHC 2331 (Admin) 30 July 2024. Judgment here
It is rare for the High Court to refuse an application by a Senior Coroner to overturn their own inquest. However in this case the judges were not persuaded that it was either necessary or desirable to make the order that the Coroner sought.
The case centred around two deaths in the same fatal road crash. What the Coroner wished to correct was a single aspect of the determination she had arrived at in the car passenger’s inquest (relating to the amount of alcohol the driver had consumed), which the car driver’s subsequent inquest had revealed to be incorrect.
However the Court did not agree that a fresh investigation and inquest was necessary: the consumption of alcohol had not been stated to be causative of the passenger’s death and in any event the existence of the High Court judgment alongside the driver’s Record of Inquest meant that the public record taken as a whole now clarified the true position.
It was also not desirable to hold a fresh inquest given the wishes of the parents of the deceased who did not relish the distress of the thought of a second inquest re-opening painful matters for them, and where holding yet another inquest also opened up the risk, however small, of yet further inconsistent findings relating to a single accident which had killed two young people.
Background
The Senior Coroner had applied under s.13(b) Coroners Act 1988 to quash an inquest into the death of Ms Anna Lovell who had been fatally injured when travelling as a passenger in a car. The driver, Mr Teague, had also died in the crash.
Ms Lovell’s inquest took place in May 2022 when the Coroner returned a narrative conclusion on the record of inquest (‘ROI’) stating that “at the time the driver had a significant amount of alcohol in his blood”. However, when Mr Teague’s inquest took place in March 2023, more detailed toxicological evidence was available which cast significant doubt on those earlier findings. The toxicology suggested that although Mr Teague had consumed some alcohol prior to his death it was possible that some or even all of the alcohol present at the time of testing had been produced post-mortem.
The Senior Coroner therefore wanted the determination and findings she had made at Ms Lovell’s inquest to be quashed, so that she might rehear the matter in light of that new information.
Applying the ‘Hillsbrough’ principle
When considering ordering a fresh inquest the touchstone for the Court will be as set out in the Hillsborough[1]case. The court has to be satisfied that “the emergence of fresh evidence which may reasonably lead to the conclusion that the substantial truth about how an individual met his death was not revealed at the first inquestwould normally make it both desirable and necessary in the interests of justice for a fresh inquest to be ordered”.
Here the Court was of the view that the substantial truth of how Ms Lovell died had indeed been established at her inquest. The new toxicological evidence only affected a single aspect within the narrative conclusion. No finding had been made that the driver’s driving had been impaired by the levels of alcohol in his blood; it had been simply recorded that alcohol was present “at the time”. The ROI was silent as to whether the driver being drunk had been a cause of the collision.
A fresh investigation was not considered necessary. Ms Lovell’s ROI did not name the driver, so anyone reading it without any wider knowledge of the case would not know who was being referred to. Furthermore, there had been a public hearing and there was a publicly available ROI from Mr Teague’s inquest which, if read alongside this High Court judgment, sufficiently corrected the public record.
The fact that Ms Lovell’s parents opposed a fresh investigation was also a material consideration.[2] A second investigation and inquest would also open up the risk, however small, of further inconsistent findings.
The Senior Coroner’s application was therefore refused by the court.
Comment
It was not explained why the Coroner had chosen to hold these two inquests on different dates some ten months apart (although one might speculate that sensitivity to the families may have been a consideration). The court observed that had these inquests been heard together the problems that led to this application might not have occurred.
There is no legal route by which a coroner formally ‘conjoins’ inquests as might happen in a civil claim. However inquests will often be heard simultaneously where much the same evidence is being considered in respect of each death, albeit with some facts unique to each individual being explored separately (eg pathological evidence of individual causes of death). Adopting such an approach is common after disasters, terrorist attacks or where there are multiple deaths in traffic collisions.
Where victims and perpetrators all die in the same incident, then holding the inquest of the perpetrator separately from that of the victims is also a common practice. But even then, given that the factual circumstances are inextricably linked, most coroners will show respect to the families of the victims by holding a clearly separate, but temporally consecutive inquest into the perpetrator’s death. Indeed this was the course taken by the then Chief Coroner when holding the inquest into the perpetrator of the Westminster terror attack killings[3], and more recently by the Senior Coroner for Devon following the ‘Keyham shootings’ in Plymouth.
Where the facts related to how a number of deceased came by their deaths are inextricably linked in the same incident then to convene wholly distinct proceedings months apart will risk the inconsistency that arose here.
References
[1] See HM Attorney General v HM Coroner of South Yorkshire (West) [2012] EWHC 3783 (Admin) at paragraph 10.
[2] HM Senior Coroner for Gwent, Re [2020] EWHC 3670 (Admin), [2020] Inquest L.R. 195, [2020] 12 WLUK 331 applied.
[3] The Inquests of the victims of that terror attack were held (without a jury) between 10 September 2018 and 3 October 2018. Immediately afterwards, the hearing of the Inquest of the attacker took place (with a jury). See here