Journals
THE CORONER'S PLACE...
Coroners and Coroner Laws: What are they About?
2. It is a participatory forum. A coroner's proceeding is a public hearing, and anyone who has a useful testimony is able to offer it. This will act to counteract the tendency to parochialize investigations when fellow police officers are implicated in arbitrary, summary or extrajudicial killings.
Illustration:
Even where the police accepts to investigate cases of killings by its officers, they can manipulate the investigation process - vital witnesses may be excluded, testimonies can be doctored, and, ultimately, findings will be textured and coloured by these deliberate flaws. Here's a real life case:
On 13 January 2001, Ayuba Parakoyi, football fan was killed by policeman Francis Fredrick, following a minor disagreement between Ayuba and policeman Frederick over who would retain a free promotional T-shirt distributed by the Nigerian Breweries Limited during a Nigeria-hosted football tournament at the National Stadium, Lagos. Policeman Francis Frederick had been part of a police contingent deployed to maintain order at the stadium venue of the match. Policeman Frederick reportedly shot Ayuba Parakoyi, point blank, in the forehead, after Ayuba defied earlier threats he made to shoot Ayuba if he continued to contest the T-shirt with him. After shooting his victim, Policeman Frederick was thereafter quickly taken out of the stadium by other policemen. Police statements later attributed the shooting to an "accidental discharge".
Though the shooting occurred in a fully crowded stadium before several eye-witnesses, and was reported by national and international news-media, only one so-called eye witness was interviewed during police investigations into the case, and that witness merely corroborated the accused policeman's version of the story. That so-called witness' testimony was virtually all that formed records of police investigations into the case as forwarded to the Lagos State Director of Public Prosecution (DPP) for prosecutorial opinion. Working on the facts as presented and framed by the police, the office of the Lagos State Director of Public Prosecution expressed its opinion that "There is no eye witness account apart from that of page A 7 which is to the effect that the suspect did not intentionally shoot at the deceased but rather the man was [sic] tying to dispossess the suspect of his service pistol when suddenly his already corked pistol released the shot that killed the deceased." However, after stating that the facts as presented by the police did not disclose murder but manslaughter, the DPP's office lamented:
"We must however observe that the police did not conduct a proper investigation into this case before sending the casefile as they are duty bound to obtain statements of other eye-witnesses in order to give a clearer picture of the event that occurred at the National Stadium on the 13th of January 2001". [emphasis supplied].
