Professor Belinda Carpenter was invited to present her 10 years of research on coronial decision making to Queensland Coroners as part of the Annual Magistrates Conference, Brisbane, 30-31st July 2015.
The intensely emotional nature of a coroner’s role can precipitate coroners erecting barriers to protect themselves from psychological trauma when they don’t feel appropriately equipped to engage effectively with bereaved family members. They seek distance by relying on other professionals to act as buffers. This tendency is reinforced by legal rules designed to ensure trial judges are impartial and untainted by the receipt of extra curial information when deciding cases that prohibit meeting and communication between the decision maker and a party to the proceedings – even though most coroners’ cases don’t go to court and inquests are very different from trials. A tradition of judicial dispassion that is thought to maximise objectivity and reliability, exacerbates the problem. All of these factors militate against a constructive, emotional alliance between the coroner and the party most in need of compassionate understanding – the family of the deceased.
Since the 1990s, the little research that has been conducted on coronial death investigations has indicated that families bereaved through a coronial death – which is often unexpected and violent – are not aided in their grief by coronial processes. Our research is suggesting that coroners are increasingly using such knowledge and have made concerted efforts to decrease the added distress caused by elements of their legal processes and thus demonstrate an increasing commitment to therapeutic jurisprudence. In our view, if the impediments described above could be minimized, an ethic of care could be incorporated into the normative theory of the coroner’s court. That would require coroners to be better trained in this aspect of their role and recognition by the higher courts and perhaps in legislation of the importance of this factor.
To read more of Professor Carpenter’s research, please click here.
Comments are closed.