Custody deaths under spotlight

Human rights groups have hit out at plans to exempt prison and police custody from corporate manslaughter legislation.
The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill, which reached report stage in the House of Lords this week, creates an offence where gross corporate negligence leads to a person’s death in the workplace or in other settings.

However, while the legislation applies to police forces and government departments, as well as private companies, it excludes deaths in prison and police custody.

Now a coalition of law reform groups—JUSTICE, Liberty, the Prison Reform Trust and Inquest—has suggested a set of amendments to include deaths in prison and police custody in the offence.

Inquest’s casework service says there were more than 2,000 deaths in police and prison custody between 1995 and 2005, and claims that many of these deaths raise “issues of negligence, systemic failures to care for the vulnerable, institutional violence, racism, inhumane treatment and abuse of human rights”.

Despite a pattern of cases where inquest juries have found overwhelming evidence of unlawful and excessive use of force or gross neglect, no police or prison officer has been held responsible, either at an individual level or at a senior management level, for institutional and systemic failures to improve training and other policies. This is even the case when inquests return unlawful killing verdicts.

The coalition adds: “The government points to public inquiries as an alternative route to accountability—but it refused to hold public inquiries into the deaths of both Zahid Mubarek and Joseph Scholes.

“In both cases, the government fought the families’ attempts to have a public inquiry held in the civil courts. Without a legal victory by the family, the Zahid Mubarek Inquiry would not have been held.”

Sally Ireland, senior legal officer at JUSTICE, says: “The bottom line is that too many people—including children—are dying in custody and that the current law is not doing enough to prevent it.”