Monday 23 February 2009

I Guess It Wasn’t ‘awight, After All….

The Independent Police Complaints Commission's inquiry into the 2001 death of Stuart Lubbock, due to be revealed tomorrow (Tuesday), will say that the first officers to respond to the incident entirely failed to treat it as a crime scene, The Daily Telegraph understands.
What a shocker! I’ve not heard that one before.
Oh. Wait
Instead, they took the word of witnesses that Mr Lubbock had drowned in a tragic accident at Barrymore's £2 million house in Roydon, Essex, and failed to conduct forensic tests.
Well, at least they didn’t actually hide evidence, so far as we know. So they are still just about ahead of Merseyside Police in the morality stakes…
The IPCC report will be critical of individual officers from Essex Police for assuming so quickly that Mr Lubbock had drowned, and failing to treat it as a suspicious death and carry out the necessary procedures, such as sealing off the area for forensic tests and treating it as a crime scene.
No doubt a lengthy and expensive ‘training issue’ has been identified and bid for, when sacking the officers concerned would concentrate minds much more cheaply.
The post mortem did not even take a sample of water from his lungs, which would have helped to determine if he had drowned.
That’s our forensic teams, less Gil Grissom or Mac Taylor, more Inspector Clouseau…
Calls for a second inquest last year were rejected. The Attorney General's Office said that while fresh evidence had been put forward it still did not confirm the cause of death and therefore it was considered that a second inquest "could not result in anything other than an open verdict" – which is the verdict recorded at the original hearing.
Justice denied once again…

2 comments:

Dr Evil said...

First thing you do with a drowning victim after opening the thorax is to excise the lungs and have a look for water. the classic method to ensure they drowned and were not simply put into the water after death. Frankly I find all this utterly incredible. Are all these troops commanded by General Incompetence or what?

JuliaM said...

"...the classic method to ensure they drowned and were not simply put into the water after death..."

It seems, reading the report in the 'Telegraph', that they did confirm the presence of water in the lungs, but without a sample, were unable to say wether the water came from the pool or other water source (though why you'd drown a chap anywhere else if you had a huge swimming pool handy, I couldn't say. But then, I'm a practical sort...).

Further compounding this, the pathologist, one Ian Calder, said that "His lungs did not look like drowned lungs.". Whatever that means...

"Are all these troops commanded by General Incompetence or what?"

It's beginning to look that way, isn't it?