Of late years the examination of the witnesses, and wrangling of the legal gentlemen engaged in the case, have caused the coroner’s inquiry to be protracted to a needless length.
It is either one of two things: the inquiry is knocked off with unseemly haste, or else carried on beyond all reasonable limits.
The fourth of Edward the First, the original Coroner’s Act, which gave an appointed official the right to inquire into the causes of sudden death within his jurisdiction, was no doubt at that comparatively lawless period an eminently necessary piece of legislation.
In those days deeds of violence, tavern brawls, and mysterious deaths, were of daily occurrence, and doubtless this was the primary reason for the establishment of a legal court of inquiry, and it cannot be concealed that it is needed in our own times.
In remote districts the inevitable coroner’s inquiry, which is sure to follow any and every case of sudden and violent death, is a precautionary measure for the safety of her Majesty’s subjects. It acts as a deterrent against crime, and assists the criminal courts in arriving at just verdicts.
But it is felt in cities and large towns that the coroner’s court is an expensive and withal fussy ante-chamber to the justice-room of the stipendiary magistrates, and that some alteration is needed in the conduct of these inquiries.
The old fashion mode—and indeed one which was followed in the case of the Larchgrove-road murder—of holding coroners’ courts in the parlours of public-houses, within hearing of the noise and ill-timed jollity of the tap-room, and of laying the corpse in some shed at the back yard of a beershop, among the cans and pewter pots, is very objectionable.
The practice degrades the dignity of justice.
There are, however, still more important objections, in the lack of legal training for which too many of our coroners are conspicuous, and in the needless waste of public and private time and money in examining witnesses—in speeches of counsel, who wrangle, ask irrelevant questions, badger witnesses, and retard instead of aid the course of justice.
This of late has grown almost insupportable.