Coroners and Justice Bill

We now turn, at last, to the issue of inquests without a jury. I use that term advisedly, because the central issue is not whether proceedings on inquests should sometimes have to be held in private—in some national security cases, there are certainly times when that should happen—but whether when somebody has died at the hands of the state, a jury that has been summoned should, at the behest of the Secretary of State or through some other procedure, afterwards be dismissed and removed from the case, so that the case in the inquest continues without a jury. Originally in this Bill—of course, there were proposals in a previous Bill—the Government proposed a procedure whereby the Secretary of State would simply certify that the inquest would involve a risk of releasing information that might harm national security, relations with a foreign power, the prevention of crime or the protection of witnesses, or that might involve "other real harm" to the public interest. That certificate would mean that the coroner would be instantly removed from the case and replaced by a High Court judge, and that any jury that had been summoned would be removed, too. The case would continue without a jury and, presumably, in private, excluding everybody from the proceedings, including the family of the deceased. There were protests from all sides about that proposal. It was wrong, first of all, because the Secretary of State decided everything himself on the certificate. Secondly, the grounds on which the Secretary of State could issue a certificate were far too wide. The real harm clause, for example, was very broad and it was confusing, because the Bill contains the exact same phrase later on which the Government admitted meant something different. Protecting witnesses sounded plausible as a reason for excluding the public, at least, from the full inquest, until in Committee the Government admitted under pressure from amendments that proposed giving a power to coroners to give anonymity to witnesses that coroners already have extensive powers to protect the identity of witnesses by the equivalent of anonymity orders and to impose all the special measures that are open to criminal courts when it comes to protecting identity and protecting witnesses. The broad grounds therefore made no sense. Thirdly, the removal of the jury raises a fundamental point. Juries do not come into inquests in many cases, but when they do, it is because the case is a crucial one—when someone has died at the hands of the police or in custody, and where there are serious questions about the responsibility of the state for the death. It is unquestionably a crucial part of public confidence in the state, the police and the Prison Service that there are ordinary people in the jury to make the judgments in such cases.