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An inquest is a judicial inquiry in common law jurisdictions, particularly one held to determine the cause of a person's death. [1] Conducted by a judge, jury, or government official, an inquest may or may not require an autopsy carried out by a coroner or medical examiner. Generally, inquests are conducted only when deaths are sudden or ...
A coroner must summon a jury for an inquest if the death was not a result of natural causes and occurred when the deceased was in state custody (for example in prison, police custody, or whilst detained under the Mental Health Act 1983); or if it was the result of an act or omission of a police officer; or if it was a result of a notifiable accident, poisoning or disease. [5]
Two successive inquests, in May 1981 and May 2004, have returned open verdicts on the victims of the New Cross house fire in which 13 black teenagers were killed by a fire at a birthday party. The families of the victims have long believed that the fire was started deliberately, possibly as a racist attack, and the verdict was interpreted as a ...
In England and Wales, all inquests were once conducted with a jury. They acted somewhat like a grand jury, determining whether a person should be committed to trial in connection to a death. Such a jury was made up of up to twenty-three men, and required the votes of twelve to render a decision.
A subject of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment has his blood drawn, c. 1953.. Numerous experiments which were performed on human test subjects in the United States in the past are now considered to have been unethical, because they were performed without the knowledge or informed consent of the test subjects. [1]
The term forensic stems from the Latin word, forēnsis (3rd declension, adjective), meaning "of a forum, place of assembly". [5] The history of the term originates in Roman times, when a criminal charge meant presenting the case before a group of public individuals in the forum.
The inquest does not normally name any individual person as responsible. [2] In R (on the application of Maughan) v Her Majesty's Senior Coroner for Oxfordshire [ 3 ] the Supreme Court clarified that the standard of proof for suicide and unlawful killing in an inquest is the civil standard of the balance of probabilities and not the criminal ...
An inquisitorial system is a legal system in which the court, or a part of the court, is actively involved in investigating the facts of the case.This is distinct from an adversarial system, in which the role of the court is primarily that of an impartial referee between the prosecution and the defense.