Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

These amendments cover the issue of deaths in custody caused by gross negligence. In the Joint Committee on Human Rights report on deaths in custody published almost two years ago to the day, the Committee reported that, in prisons and mental health institutions, someone is killed, kills themselves, or dies in questionable circumstances every other day on average. Of course, not in all, but certainly in some of those cases people in custody have died as a result of the gross negligence of the authorities that should have been caring for them. I mention just two cases to illustrate the point. In 1994, Christopher Edwards, a remand prisoner, was violently killed in his prison cell by a highly dangerous, mentally disordered prisoner with whom he had been made to share his cell. The European Court of Human Rights found that the authorities should have known about the risk to Christopher’s life but failed to pass on the necessary information about the dangerous offender and also failed to screen him properly when he arrived at the prison. They therefore failed in their duty to protect Christopher’s right to life. In 2000 it happened again in perhaps even worse circumstances. Zahid Mubarek, a young Asian man, was detained in Feltham. He was beaten to death with a table leg by his cell mate who was well known by the Prison Service to be a violent and sometimes racist psychopath. The report of the independent inquiry into the death said that the two should never have been placed in the same cell. It found:"““Had there been effective management from the Governor down, and within the wider prison system, the death could have been prevented””—" language not dissimilar to Lord Justice Sheen’s in the Zeebrugge inquiry. I particularly refer to those two cases, out of all the violent deaths, for good reasons, to which I will refer later. Suffice it to say for now that, in both cases, if this Bill were to apply to deaths in custody, there would at the very least be a case to answer by the Prison Service—and probably the prospect of a successful conviction. In its 2004 report on deaths in custody, the Joint Committee on Human Rights recommended both consideration of a new offence of causing or allowing the death of a person in state custody; and, of particular relevance today, that an offence of corporate killing should be made applicable to public bodies such as the police, Prison Service and health authorities, to provide adequate protection of the right to life against careless killing by public bodies. In their response, the Government refused to agree to the individual offence, but said in relation to the corporate killing offence that they"““recognised the importance of accountability where serious management failures lead to death and is committed to producing a draft Bill...the details of our proposals, and the sort of circumstances in which it would apply, will be set out””." That obviously sounded rather more hopeful to the Committee. However, our Committee's optimism was clearly misplaced. The Bill as drafted does not permit prosecutions for corporate manslaughter against the Prison Service, even in cases such as the two I have referred to, even where it could be shown that the death was caused by gross management failure. The effect of my and others' amendments would be to make such prosecutions possible, where a death in custody has been caused by gross negligence in the management of the public authority in question. The issue has been carefully considered by the Select Committee on Home Affairs and the Select Committee on Work and Pensions in their joint report on the draft Bill, and by the Joint Committee on Human Rights for a second time under my chairmanship in its report on the current Bill. All three Committees concluded that that there was no justification for excluding deaths in custody from the scope of the new offence. So why have the Government failed to include them, given the scale of the problem? The Government have offered two distinct justifications for excluding deaths in custody. First, they say that criminal prosecutions are not necessary in the case of deaths in custody caused by gross negligence, because of the other accountability mechanisms which are already available. Such deaths, they say, are already subject to rigorous independent scrutiny through public inquests before juries and through independent reports capable of ranging widely over management issues. Of course, that argument applies to nearly all deaths that could be the subject of a prosecution under this Bill. There will inevitably be an inquest into such fatalities. Deaths at work inevitably lead to Health and Safety Executive investigations. Rail or other transport deaths are subject to investigations by the specialist inspectorates and often by the police, too, so what is different about deaths in custody? The answer is the opposite of what the Government claim. Far from wide-ranging independent reports being the norm, if anything, they are the exception, and their establishment is often fiercely resisted by the Government in the first place, as happened in the two cases of Zahid Mubarek and Christopher Edwards, to which I referred earlier. The independent public inquiry into Zahid Mubarek's death only took place because the Home Secretary was ordered by the House of Lords to hold such an inquiry, under the Human Rights Act 1998. That was more than three and a half years after the death occurred. The family's requests for such an inquiry had been refused by the Home Secretary. Zahid's family had to fight the Home Secretary's denial of their right to know what happened all the way to the House of Lords. There, they eventually obtained a declaration that an independent public investigation of the death had to be held, in order to satisfy the obligation imposed by the right to life in article 2 of the European convention on human rights. The subsequent inquiry finally reported in June 2006, more than six years after Zahid Mubarek's death, in the castigating terms to which I referred earlier. The House of Lords in the Mubarek case relied heavily on the earlier decision of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Christopher Edwards. In that case, the Government also refused the family's requests for an independent public inquiry. Then, the family had to fight the case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights to establish, more than seven years after Christopher Edwards' death, that the Government had failed in their duty to ensure that there was an adequate and effective investigation into the death. Even after that, no independent inquiry was ever held into that case. Moreover, those alternative methods of accountability have proved inadequate to protect people from non-natural deaths in custody. As for the possibility of individual liability for manslaughter, of the cases of deaths in custody known to Inquest from 1991 to August 2006, there was not one conviction for manslaughter in relation to a death in custody, following an inquest verdict of unlawful killing. Therefore the Government's argument that deaths in custody can be distinguished owing to the rigorous investigation of such cases, as compared with all others covered by the Bill, simply does not stand up to scrutiny.