Dear Lord Hermer
First, I would like to offer my congratulations on your recent appointment to the post of Attorney-General. I write to you in this regard.
On 17 February 2009 you invited me, together with some other doctors, to visit you at Doughty Street chambers to discuss the death of Dr David Kelly. We set out our concerns about the manner in which the state had dealt with this tragedy and explained to you our doubts that it was investigated rigorously. As you know, the coroner’s inquest into Dr Kelly’s death was – uniquely - subsumed into the ad hoc inquiry chaired by Lord Hutton, who concluded that Dr Kelly took his own life in July 2003. This is the only time in British legal history that a coroner's inquest into a single death has been adjourned using Section 17A of the 1988 Coroners Act so that a non-statutory public inquiry could be held instead. The lawful process of the opening of a coroner's inquest did not happen. The cart was put before a well tried and respected horse.
Careful analysis over many years by the group of doctors of which I was a member – plus the work of various lawyers, parliamentarians and investigative journalists - has found how woefully inadequate Lord Hutton’s non-statutory public inquiry was. To name just a handful of its deficiencies: Lord Hutton failed to call key witnesses to give evidence to his inquiry; yet those witnesses who were called were not required to give evidence on oath. We now know that there were no fingerprints on the knife Kelly allegedly used to end his life – even though he wasn’t wearing gloves on the day his body was found. (This was never mentioned at the Hutton Inquiry even though it was known to Thames Valley Police at the time the Hutton Inquiry hearings took place). Lord Hutton spent only half a day of the 24 days on which his inquiry sat examining the medical evidence relating to Dr Kelly’s death. And Lord Hutton failed to consider the crucial matter – incumbent upon every coroner - of whether Dr Kelly intended to commit suicide.
I must stress that the above list is not exhaustive. It is designed to underscore the point that, legally speaking, Lord Hutton’s ad hoc inquiry was less independent and less thorough than a coroner’s inquest would have been, with disastrous results. The high bar that a coroner would have had to clear in order to reach a suicide finding in the matter of Dr Kelly’s death was simply absent from the Hutton Inquiry.
When we met you at your chambers in 2009, we were being helped pro bono by Leigh Day & Co. Knowing you to be a man of truth and integrity, Frances Swaine, of that firm, advised us to consult you. Your sympathetic view was that we should focus on the first cause of death advanced by Lord Hutton - “haemorrhage from a cut left ulnar artery” – as originally written by a Home Office pathologist, Dr Nicholas Hunt, and also to judicially review the then Attorney General, Baroness Scotland, rather than JR her refusal to instigate an inquest. You may know that with wide public support a hearing was eventually held at the High Court in December 2011 - Halpin v Regina. In total, about five hours were spent in plea and defence. At the hearing’s conclusion, Mr Justice Nicol read out from 19 pages of text and determined that the Attorney General of the day – Dominic Grieve – had been right to refuse an inquest into Dr Kelly's death in 2011. And there, the matter of Dr Kelly’s unnatural death has most unsatisfactorily remained, for Mr Grieve's decision was no more than a distant echo of Lord Hutton's original finding.
I am aware that Britain’s legal system is facing many crises, especially in the criminal and family justice courts and in terms of prison capacity. Yet public trust in our country’s law enforcement, and what follows in the courts, has withered. Specifically, many British citizens – including some Appeal Court judges – do not believe that Dr Kelly's death was adequately investigated at Lord Hutton's inquiry. This has left a cloud of suspicion hanging over this troubling and vital matter.
For this reason I am calling upon you to kindly consider allowing a full coroner’s inquest into Dr Kelly’s death to be held in order to resolve this situation for once and for all. My understanding is that you alone as Attorney-General, has the power to do this.
I revere ‘the law’ and quote from your speech of yesterday in the Royal Courts of Justice.
“Being in government is a privilege that carries the responsibility of having to make hard choices but as we face the challenging path ahead the rule of law will be the lodestar for this government.” *
Yours sincerely,
David Halpin MB BS FRCS Dartmoor
* https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/attorney-general-swearing-in-speech-rt-hon-richard-hermer-kc
