Alfie Evans application tomorrow

The funeral of Alfie Evans is reported to be planned for tomorrow.  Having received no reply by 6 o’clock today to my email (copied below) to the lawyers of Alfie’s parents, The Christian Legal Centre, I have concluded that it will probably be necessary for me to make an urgent application to the court tomorrow, in a bid to prevent the cremation of Alfie’s body without a prior post-mortem examination and toxicology report to determine the cause of Alfie’s death reliably.

I shall be attending at Court 37, at the Royal Courts of Justice, at the start of business, on Monday 14th May 2018.

Anybody willing to support me, just by being there, silently, as spectators, would be appreciated.

Unfortunately, there may already have been a post-mortem examination of Alfie, and a toxicology report.  The problem is that the coroner was unwilling to confirm or deny this when I was in correspondence with him.  The parents’ legal team appear not to know.  I have therefore been put into the situation of having to make an application that may not be necessary.

There follows the most recent and most formal of my several emails to Alfie’s parents’ legal team, last week and over the present weekend.

My email to Alfie’s parents’ legal team

Subject:	Your clients, Thomas Evans and Kate James, the parents of the late Alfie Evans, and any arrangements they may have made to dispose of the remains of their late son
Date:	Sat, 12 May 2018 20:59:30 +0100

 

OPEN CORRESPONDENCE – URGENT

Dear Andrea

Would your client please be willing to postpone any disposal of Alfie’s body following Monday’s funeral, in order not to pervert the course of justice, by destroying evidence?

I wrote a week ago to the coroner, asking for information about Alfie Evans’ inquest, when that became available.  I did not think I was asking anything controversial at the time.  An account of the (surprising) email correspondence that ensued between myself and the coroner is published at the following blog post of mine:

Alfie Evans’ non-existent coroner’s inquest – what are they trying to hide?
https://johnallmanuk.wordpress.com/2018/05/10/alfie-evans-inquest/

This blog post has attracted considerable public attention already.

As a matter of law, there must be a coroner’s inquest whenever there is reason to suspect (as there is in Alfie’s case) that the deceased died while in custody or otherwise in state detention.  (See Coroners and Justice Act 2009 section 1.)  Furthermore, that inquest must have a jury if the senior coroner has reason to suspect that the cause of death is unknown.  The cause of Alfie’s death seems to me, and to most of the public who have contacted me, to be unknown.  However, the coroner has insisted, in email to me, that the cause of his death isn’t unknown.  It was, he says, a diagnosed disease.  This is surprising, because Alfie’s disease had widely been reported, and I believe testified about by expert witnesses, to be an “undiagnosed” disease, an example of unknown cause if ever there was.

I have promised to apply for permission to apply for judicial review of the relevant senior coroner’s unlawful decision to discontinue his investigation, without an inquest.  Your clients are not, automatically, needed as parties to that judicial review.  There is no urgency about any of this.  I do not need your help with that.  However, there is another issue, of some urgency, about which I urgently need your clients’ response, over the present weekend, ideally before 18:00 tomorrow.

The coroner is unwilling either to confirm or to deny that the decision of his which I intend to challenge as unlawful, was informed by his sight of the report of a post mortem examination of Alfie’s remains.  He has neither confirmed nor denied that there has even been a post mortem examination of Alfie.

Yet a post mortem examination would uniquely enable the retrospective re-evaluation of the accuracy of expert witnesses’ various predictions in the senior courts as to the likely time, manner, cause and alleged inevitability of Alfie’s future death (as it was then).  There appears to a groundswell of public opinion that somebody ought to seek an emergency injunction to forbid the disposal of Alfie’s body on Monday, destroying such evidence as might be available from a post mortem examination.  That is, unless there has already been a clandestine post mortem examination, something which the general public would be not in a position to ascertain if there had been.

That injunction would need to be against your clients, who are organising a funeral, presumably with the intention of burying or cremating their son’s remains afterwards.  There is now pressure on me to apply for such an injunction.  That is because I mentioned the possibility that I might do so, during my correspondence with the coroner.  However, it would be improper for me to make such an application ex parte without first giving your clients the opportunity, legally advised, of making such an application unnecessary, because they had given an appropriate undertaking.

If your client is willing to co-operate, either by confirming that there has already been a post mortem, something which the coroner is unwilling to confirm or to deny, or by promising not to bury or cremate Alfie’s body after the funeral, it will not be necessary for anybody to seek an emergency injunction against your client before Monday’s planned disposal of the body.

Please obtain your client’s instructions, and respond on his behalf, urgently.  Absent a favourable response, I shall need to prepare for an unscheduled visit to Liverpool or to London on Monday, in order to make, ex parte, an urgent application myself, to interdict disposal of Alfie’s body without a post-mortem examination first, including a toxicology report, or until further order.

Because of the pressure I am under to make this urgent application before the funeral, it may become necessary that I should publish this email without further notice, so that it may be seen that I am doing my utmost to prevent the destruction of the most important evidence of all, before the obligatory inquest that the coroner has unlawfully sought to avoid holding.

Yours in Christ,

John Allman