Andrew Warnock KC and Edwin Buckett successfully defend the Chief Constable of Leicestershire in a £10m brain damage claim

Following a 5-day liability trial in the High Court in Manchester, the Claimant’s negligence and Human Rights Act claims were dismissed by HHJ Bird sitting as a Judge of the High Court.

The Claimant was a Type 1 diabetic who suffered from a history of psychiatric problems. He had made various threats to end his life, including by overdosing on insulin, which caused the police to attend his home address. He was arrested on suspicion of possessing illegal firearms and other offences and then detained in police custody overnight. Whilst in detention, the Claimant refused a mental health assessment and declined to engage with mental health professionals.

Eventually, a decision was made not to charge the Claimant with any offence, and he fell to be released on Christmas Eve 2018.

However, the police were concerned that he did not have the means to administer his insulin over the Christmas period, so they provided him with the syringes to do so before he was released. A few hours after his release, the Claimant took a near fatal overdose of insulin which caused him a very severe brain injury. At the time he put a message on Facebook with a photograph of the syringes which said: “Luckily the police supplied me with the necessary equipment to finish the job”.

The Claimant’s claim concerned the common law power to protect detainees from the risk of harm and an assumption of responsibility to the Claimant. He claimed that he should have been held pending an assessment under Section 13 of the Mental Health Act 1983 or detained under Section 136 the 1983 Act. In answer, the Defendant relied on the obligation to release detained individuals who are not charged pursuant to Section 37 of PACE 1984 and submitted that on the evidence as to how the Claimant had behaved in custody the police had no grounds to detain him under s136 and, in any event, acted reasonably in not doing so

HHJ Bird found that there was no basis for the police to continue to detain the Claimant under s136 because he was not in immediate need to care or control and that continued detention would have been unlawful. Further, he held that there was no distinct common law power to detain a person, pending a mental health assessment, as Section 136 limits the circumstances in which a person can be detained on mental health grounds. He found that a pre-release risk assessment carried out by the police was broadly adequate, in that it acknowledged the risk of suicide and self-harm but, nonetheless, there was not a real or credible risk of the Claimant self-harming at that time.

He found that releasing the Claimant with the syringes and his insulin was appropriate given that he required these to manage his diabetes and that there was no reason to suspect that he would use it in the way that he did at the time of his release. Accordingly, the claim was dismissed.

Andrew and Edwin were instructed by Keiron Walsh of DWF Manchester on behalf of the Chief Constable of Leicestershire.