Saturday, 18 April 2009

Tomlinson's coroner - how did he get it so wrong?

The news that Ian Tomlinson died of an abdominal haemorrhage and that a police office attacked him a few minutes before has been making the blogosphere rattle for the last 24 hours. The incident that led to Mr Tomlinson's death is shocking and horrific but probably expected given the tactics and attitude of the police, but what is not being explored is how the first coroner could have got it so wrong.

I'm not a coroner and have never seen an autopsy, but as someone with a clinical qualification (I'm a registered nurse) I have to ask how he could find a substantial amount of blood in the abdominal cavity and then conclude that the death was due to coronary artery disease, i.e. a heart attack.

I suspect that we will never know whether there was any pressure put on him by the police but there can only be three possibilities for him to come to that conclusion:
  1. It is a perfectly reasonable conclusion to come to
  2. He was pressured by the police or some other person or organisation
  3. He is incompetant
Had the video footage of him being attacked not been made public a second post-mortem would have not been ordered and Tomlinson's death would have remained due to a heart attack. If this post-mortem had been a cover up then it may have been sucessful without the video evidence.

2 comments:

bigbluemeanie said...

The first coroner, Dr Freddy Patel, has previous.

Wealden Progressive Movement said...

I have to agree that the entire situation appears deeply suspicious.

The Wealden Progressive Movement has alreasy called for a public enquiry into the policing across the G20 protests and we are drafting a letter to the IPCC.