These two 2006 NIGRA submissions on suicide (one attached, one below) fill in the background to what we were discussing yesterday by way of the coroner’s discretion on inquests. They fell on stony ground but should be pursued perhaps by way of s. 75 interpretation.
A Further Submission by NIGRA (Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association) in Response to the Northern Ireland Department of Health’s Suicide Strategy Consultation Paper
Self-Inflicted Fatalities in the Gay Community, the Role of the Coroner and the Reliability of Statistics
Dear Mr Bell,
In a letter of 11 July 2006, Mr J L Leckey, Senior Coroner for Northern Ireland stated to the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association (NIGRA) that where all the evidence points to the death being suicide my practice is to seek the views of the family as to whether they would wish an inquest to be held. In the great majority of instances the family request that the death is registered without an inquest being held.
On 27 July 2006, in response to a NIGRA request for clarification he added When an inquest is not held in relation to a suicidal death the Registrar of Deaths is notified of the medical cause of death only and that is what appears on the record.
As you know, from our earlier submission, gay organisations are concerned that families have a status superior to other properly interested parties in relation to inquests. It would now seem they have a predominant role when it comes to a decision about whether to hold an inquest in any particular suicide case.
NIGRA would want this effective veto power granted to families or family members in the case of suicides to end and be replaced by a coroner’s decision being taken in the round with other parties, if relevant, having an equal role in the decision making process. If the purpose of inquests is, amongst other things, to satisfy the proper public interest in knowing how a particular individual died it seems inappropriate to give one section of the public the effective power to prevent an inquest being held especially when it appears that power is being exercised in the great majority of [such] cases.
This veto also prevents patterns of suicidal behaviour being noticed, making analysiSeand remedial action that much more difficult. This would apply for example in relation to the Bushmills suicide in January 2006 which may have been connected to a police cottaging investigation in Coleraine, and a suicide in April 2006 associated with a similar investigation by Lisburn police. In other words, if these deaths did in fact occur as a consequence of bad police practice or discriminatory procedures there is no way this can be established, and appropriate action to prevent similar events will not be enabled.
In his second letter, Mr Leckey reveals that a very large number of suicides not followed by an inquest will not be recorded in any such detectable way on the death certificate. This means that the current statistics on suicides must be a severe underestimate. Again this seems almost perverse in that the purpose of inquestSeand or identifiable text on death certificates is to enable the public to know what is happening. Instead we seem, in the case of suicide, to have a pointless system designed to prevent this.
We believe that these two deaths this year connected to separate police investigations might have been avoided. In order to minimise the numbers of such deaths in the future we ask that the final version of your suicide strategy recommends that inquests into likely suicides be held where any party so desires, and that death certificate text, where there is no inquest, records that it is the coroner’s opinion that death was by suicide.
We would also request a recommendation that if a coroner establishes that failings in police practice or procedure may have been a factor in the death by suicide, the case file should be passed to the Police Ombudsman for investigation.