England and Wales Court of Appeal (Civil Division) Decisions

IN THE SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE
COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM THE ADMINISTRATIVE COURT
(MR JUSTICE ELIAS)

		Royal Courts of Justice Strand London WC2 Tuesday, 26th March 2002

Tuesday, 26th March 2002

1. LORD JUSTICE SEDLEY: Before the court is an application for permission to appeal against the refusal by Elias J on 10th September 2001 to give Mrs Chaudhari permission to apply for judicial review. The case, as Elias J said, is a tragic and most unusual one. It arises from the death of Mrs Chaudhari's small child on 26th October 2000 in the King George Hospital at the age of 5 months. The child had been born with a rare and, according to the medical evidence, invariably terminal condition. The family, however, believed that the child was making remarkable progress and not exhibiting the expected signs of deterioration. Her death was therefore, in the family's view, not natural, and they have formed the view that it was a death brought about deliberately by the medical profession for experimental reasons in order to find what it was that had enabled this small child to survive a condition which was expected to prove fatal.
2. The coroner obtained a report of a well qualified paediatric pathologist, Professor Risden, which concluded that death was due to natural causes. The family, which includes the baby's aunt, a pharmacist, took issue with this and concluded, when the coroner did not abandon Professor Risden's report, that the coroner was in a conspiracy with the medical profession to suppress the truth. The coroner in strong terms rejected these accusations in correspondence.
3. At the time of the application to Elias J the inquest, which was to be held with a jury, had been adjourned on a number of occasions but was due to be heard the following day. The result of his refusal of permission was that the inquest went ahead. It returned a verdict of death by natural causes. I am told today that proceedings have been issued in the Divisional Court to quash that verdict, probably upon the same grounds as have been advanced to me today. Before I turn to those grounds I need to say a word about the authorship of the submissions that have been made to me today.
4. Mrs Chaudhari, whom I have heard briefly and who is a fluent and articulate speaker, has nevertheless wanted, for understandable reasons, to be represented. She has sought representation in the form of Dr Adoko. I will not go through Dr Adoko's history as it is known to the court. I will simply say that, while he is a qualified lawyer, he is not qualified to practise as an advocate before courts of this country. He was, however, voluntarily heard in the exercise of his discretion by Elias J. When application was made in writing by him to be heard again before this court, Laws LJ, having considered the papers, refused the application. He wrote:

"I do not permit Dr Adoko to represent the applicant at the hearing. The interests of justice in general and of the applicant in particular do not require that to be done."

5. I have no reason on the basis of what I have heard today to dissent from that view. But in deference to Mrs Chaudhari's wishes and to the fact that Elias J heard Dr Adoko I have heard him today on Mrs Chaudhari's behalf. While I agree entirely with Laws LJ that the interests of justice did not in any way require me to do so, nevertheless it seemed to me consistent with them in the very peculiar circumstances of this case to let Dr Adoko speak for Mrs Chaudhari. I do not want this to be taken as any kind of a licence or general indication of the desirability of courts doing so in other cases.
6. Dr Adoko has advanced a series of points in support of the application for permission to appeal. One, and a serious one if it were made out, is that out of all the doctors involved in the child's care the coroner summoned only the one Asian doctor and did not call for evidence from the white doctors who had also been involved. But in the absence of any evidence that the choice was influenced by anything other than their medical involvement, this is a point which simply has no substance. If it were established - though I do not see any evidence to establish it - that doctors who have something to say that is relevant but are white have been unaccountably excluded, the position might be different; but it is not the position on the evidence that I have seen.
7. Secondly, the coroner is criticised for having refused to hear Dr Adoko at the inquest. Her refusal, as I understand it, is the reason why the family boycotted the inquest. Again, the power to hear an unqualified advocate is entirely within the coroner's discretion and I can see no ground for criticising her decision not to exercise it in Dr Adoko's favour. Indeed, having seen the booklet that he has written about the case I can see every reason why she was right to take the attitude she did.
8. Thirdly, it is said that, with the father absent in India looking after his dying mother and with the mother too unwell to attend, only the child's aunt, the pharmacist, was able to give material evidence and to speak on the family's behalf, although the coroner would not hear her. If it were shown that the aunt had relevant factual evidence to give then this might be a valid ground for criticism. But the complaint, as I understand it, is that she was not able to give her opinion about the child's death. That is not an entitlement which any but a qualified expert has and she was not summoned as, and indeed was not, an expert in the relevant matters. Then it is said that Professor Risden, the pathologist used by the coroner, had already decided that the death was by natural causes. That is evidently right, but it was his job to form a view, albeit not a conclusive view. The concluded view had to be arrived at by the inquest having heard his and any other material evidence.
9. It is said that the disclosure of relevant documents to the family was refused by the coroner. Again this has been considered on the papers by Elias J and like him I do not see a basis for saying that it is the case.
10. Next, it is said by Dr Adoko that the conflict between the coroner and the family about the coroner's position put her in a position of bias because she was driven to defend herself in strong terms and must therefore have become prejudiced against the family. To assert this is to assert that a judicial officer is not capable of dealing objectively with people who object to her. If there were evidence of misconduct the court would consider it with great care, but nobody must ever suppose that they can drive a judicial officer out of office by making accusations sufficiently intemperate to provoke a denial. That kind of confrontation will not work, and nothing that has happened in this case comes close, in my judgment, to demonstrating a bias in the coroner against the family, as opposed to a perfectly legitimate defence by the coroner of her own impartiality.
11. Lastly, Dr Adoko has begun to address me on the details of the child's treatment, or, as the family believe it to have been, mistreatment by doctors. All of this was a matter for the inquest, and since the inquest was boycotted I have no evidence that it was not, so far as material and so far as it was addressed by available evidence, dealt with in a proper way.
12. But beyond all these reasons for not disagreeing with Elias J's view that a case for applying for judicial review was not made out, there is now the fact that the issues in relation to the run-up to the inquest are now entirely academic. The inquest has taken place. That is why, as I understand it, a fresh application has been issued to quash the verdict. Since that is so there is no need for me to consider whether the present application should be amended so as to seek a quashing. But I record my clear view that if it had been and Dr Adoko had so applied on Mrs Chaudhari's behalf, and indeed if I had allowed the amendment so as to seek the quashing of the verdict, my decision would have been exactly the same, namely that grounds are not shown for doing so.
13. I conclude, as Elias J did, with my expressions of sympathy for everybody involved in the loss of this small child. It is a desperate tragedy for any family, but it is not helped in this case by the attempt to construct a conspiracy, indeed a conspiracy to murder, out of nothing; because it seems to me that the evidence amounts to nothing in that regard. I am sorry that the matter has been brought this far and that the family have plainly been encouraged to do so when other counsel might have prevailed with them. But so far as the law is concerned there is not, in my judgment, any ground for impugning the inquest.
14. The application is therefore dismissed.
(Application dismissed; no order as to costs).