Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many inquests were resumed after an adjournment where the cause of death was murder in each of the last three years; and how many of those inquests were heard by a jury.
The Ministry of Justice’s annual collection of data from coroners does not include the number of adjourned investigations which are resumed after a murder trial. The number of such cases will be low, however, because the coroner has to have sufficient reason for resuming the investigation and a criminal trial will often cover the statutory questions which the coroner is required to address.
The Ministry’s data collection does include the number of cases not resumed after an adjournment, broken down by sub-groups including murder. The table below shows the number of adjourned murder inquests which coroners decided not to resume from 2013 to 2017.
Year | Murder Inquests Adjourned and Not Resumed |
2013 | 333 |
2014 | 296 |
2015 | 287 |
2016 | 262 |
2017 | 326 |
Source: Coroners Statistics 2017, MoJ publication