Family 'denied justice' over police killing

The family of a man shot dead by police who mistook a table leg he was carrying for a sawn-off shotgun claimed yesterday that a coroner had denied them justice.

Harry Stanley's widow, Irene, said she would sue the Metropolitan Police, make a formal complaint about the coroner and seek a judicial review of the inquest into her husband's death.

Mrs Stanley and her supporters stormed out of St Pancras coroner's court in central London when the coroner ruled out the option of the jury returning an unlawful killing verdict. One shouted "murderers" as they marched out of the court during Dr Stephen Chan's summing-up.

Mr Stanley, 46, was shot twice by Metropolitan Police firearms officers as he walked home from a pub in Hackney, east London, in September 1999. The officers said they believed he was carrying a sawn-off shotgun in a tightly wrapped plastic bag but the item turned out to be the leg of a coffee table he had taken to be repaired.

After the jury returned an open verdict, Mrs Stanley said outside court: "It's disgusting. We have been denied justice. The jury were not allowed to bring a verdict of unlawful killing even if they wanted to. It's not right. There has been no police officer charged with the mistakes they made. The officers stood in the dock and never even said sorry or showed any remorse."

Mrs Stanley's solicitor, Nogah Ofer, said: "We are launching a judicial review in the High Court on the basis that the coroner made a blatant error of law. If there's any evidence that the jury could use to reach a certain verdict, let alone extremely strong evidence, as in this case, then that verdict should be available."

Dr Chan had given the jury only two options: lawful killing or an open verdict. It chose the latter after deliberating for more than an hour. As the 10 jury members left the building they each shook Mrs Stanley by the hand. One man said to her: "No favouritism. We just did what we thought was right."

Mr Stanley, a painter and decorator with three children, died after being shot in the head by Inspector Neil Sharman and in the hand by PC Kevin Fagan. The firearms team was alerted after a man in a pub where Mr Stanley had been drinking dialled 999 and reported an "Irishman" carrying a sawn-off shotgun in a plastic bag.

The inquest was shown evidence indicating that Mr Stanley must have been facing away from the officers when he was killed. The fatal shot passed through the left side of his head. But Dr Chan made no mention of the testimony of the forensic experts in his summing-up. He told the jurors they should come to their verdict based on what they thought the officers believed when they had fired at Mr Stanley.

In their evidence to the inquest, the police officers said Mr Stanley had turned around and pointed the plastic bag at them as if it were a shotgun. Dr Chan said: "A person who is attacked or believes that he's about to be attacked then can use such force as is reasonably necessary to defend himself. If that's the situation, then his use of force is not unlawful."

He asked the jurors to ask themselves two questions. "Firstly, did the officer believe or may he honestly have believed that it was necessary to defend himself? If you decide that he was or may have been acting in that belief, then you must go on to answer the second question." The second question was whether the officers had used reasonable force.

He asked jurors to "cover your thoughts" of what the object in Mr Stanley's hands turned out to be and to focus on the circumstances at the time.

After the jury delivered its verdict, Dr Chan offered his sympathy to Mr Stanley's family, but the relatives had not returned to court to hear him. The coroner said his death had come about by "a twist of fate" and a series of coincidences leading up to the shooting. He said the table leg in a plastic bag had been demonstrated to be "uncannily indistinguishable" from that of a sawn-off shotgun.

The Metropolitan Police issued a statement extending its "deepest sympathies" to the Stanley family. It said: "This has been a very stressful time for both officers who, along with their colleagues, are required to confront the most difficult policing situations, often having to make split-second decisions."