The coroner's court, its uses and abuses : with suggestions for reform / by J.J. Dempsy.

  • Dempsy, J. J.
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The coroner's court, its uses and abuses : with suggestions for reform / by J.J. Dempsy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Their verdicts' are at present so confined that Coroners’ Juries have frequently to travel out of their legitimate rules, and pass censures upon parties concerned, or they animadvert upon a particular system requiring in their opinion amendment, or entire repeal. This is certainly an abuse which has crept into the office, for Juries have no more right to adopt such a course than any unauthorised or illegal assembly. It might be appropriate to note on this subject that in giving judgment in a case tried in the Court of Queen’s Bench, on May 8th, 1844, [The Queen v. the Coroner of the City of London,] Lord Chief Justice Denman said, that the part of the finding, which properly constituted the verdict, was that which stated the cause and manner of the death, and the state of the deceased at the time. All the rest was upon matter altogether irrelevant. The jury had no right to go out of their way for the purpose of expressing their opinion upon a matter which was not in issue before them, and it was not at all certain, that in so doing in the present case, they had not rendered themselves liable to the usual consequences of the publication of a libel. Sir John Jervis under the head of “Verdict” in his work on the “ Office and Duties of Coroners,” already quoted, says, with respect to the decision of Coroners’ Juries: “ The verdict or finding of the Coroners’ Jury is equivalent to an indictment, and must be stated with the same legal certainty and precision ; it must not be repugnant nor incon- sistent ; and the charge must be direct and positive.”