The public inquiry in to the attacks in June 2023 in Nottingham begins today in London. This is the first public inquiry in to mental health homicides in the United Kingdom, to the best of Julian Hendy’s knowledge.
It will examine the attacks on –
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- Wayne Birkett
- Ian Coates
- Marcin Gawronski
- Grace O’Malley-Kumar
- Sharon Miller
- Barnaby Webber
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Three attempted murders – Three murders.
VIEW THE PROCEEDINGS
Firstly, there is a YouTube channel for the Nottingham Inquiry where full proceedings can be viewed live or after the fact. The inquiry aims to provide a link each day to the previous day’s evidence and evidence will be taken at 10am each day until approximately 4pm.
If you watch any of the evidence and spot Marcin Gawronski goes almost entirely unmentioned, it is only because he has chosen not to participate in the inquiry and this was briefly explained by counsel the inquiry during the opening remarks.
CAPACITY
Reading coverage from the first day of the inquiry, I will freely admit to becoming extremely frustrated, to put it at its mildest. The Times coverage(£) of the proceedings includes the following summary –
“The police did not charge Calocane despite the serious nature of his victim’s injuries. The inquiry was told that Nottinghamshire police recorded is as a “crime not detected” after Calocane’s psychiatrist informed them he did not have “capacity” to be considered responsible. [Rachel] Langdale [KC] questioned why police simple accepted the doctor’s view as “the final say in the matter”.”
This website has been running for almost fifteen years and I first wrote about this topic first wrote about this topic in 2011, the second month this website was up and running. I then wrote in far more frustrated terms about “capacity” in criminal investigation in 2014.
If I may quote myself from that time talking about the use of the term as the key dependent variable to suggest whether prosecution is even possible –
“AAARRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!?!?!?! – STOP IT! … please, stop it!?!“
I didn’t write this way to be flippant, not for one moment. It’s genuine frustration that this nonsense refuses to go away no matter how patiently it is explained. I’ve since written about the same thing no fewer than three other times, often with that overt, deliberate tone of frustration and there have been countless occasions where the term has been misused.
I covered this stuff in training I’ve been asked to deliver for police officers, mental health nurses and psychiatrists, including very recently because this stuff just persists for unfathomable reasons.
CPS GUIDANCE (2019)
Finally, as my time at the College of Policing / National Police Chiefs’ Council came to an end in 2019, one of the last things I did was take part in partnership work with the Crown Prosecution Service who were reviewing their guidance on mental health, both for victims and suspects / defendants. I asked them to address the question of “capacity” in their suspect / defendant guidance and they did so.
This 2019 guidance specifically states –
“A request for “evidence as to capacity” for instance, lacks precision. Whilst this term appears elsewhere in mental health law and in some criminal offences, such a request is not clear about what the evidential and/or public interest relevance of such evidence might be. A prosecution does not have to prove as part of the evidence the suspect’s “capacity”. It implies that a prosecution would not proceed if the suspect lacks “capacity”: as will be discussed below, a prosecution may nonetheless proceed even where a defendant is likely to be found not guilty by reason of insanity, or is unfit to plead.”
This has been public guidance from the nation’s statutory agency responsible for criminal prosecution.
So if you’ll permit me to ask it like this given the important issues under consideration –
WHY THE HELL DON’T DOCTORS AND INVESTIGATORS inc SENIOR INVESTIGATING OFFICERS IN THE POLICE KNOW THIS?!
Why isn’t use and misuse of this non-criminal law term “capacity” challenged when we already knew it can lead to aberrations in criminal investigation outcomes? – this part of the CPS guidance nails it down –
“It implies that a prosecution would not proceed if the suspect lacks “capacity”:
But we KNOW FOR A FACT this is not correct or true –
WHAT AM I LOOKING FOR
During an interview on a breakfast television programme, Grace O’Malley-Kumar’s father, Sanjoy raised the question about contemporaneous assessment of the offender’s mental health. His mental state was apparently not assessed in police custody by specialist psychiatrists after his arrest. What makes this interesting beyond the well-made point that it mean legal proceedings took place in late 2023 / early 2024 where the medical evidence about Calocane’s mental state was derived from three psychiatric reports, none of which involved forensic assessment until November, more than four months after the attacks.
Why not?
The reason I’m particularly interested is Calocane had at least five contacts with Nottinghamshire Police between May 2020 and the attacks in June 2023 and all of them involved the Mental Health Act 1983. Several scenario types but all of them involving the MHA –
- He was arrested several times for an alleged offence and then assessed MHA in custody – “sectioned” twice from such situations.
- NB: I’ve always been especially interested in why there was no prosecution after the arrest where Calocane was NOT “sectioned” we’ll return to this shortly.
- The police were called to a disturbance in 2021 involving an assault and MHA assessment arranged without arrest or detention by the police.
- The police executed a s135(1) MHA warrant obtained by mental health services in September 2022 to “section” him and he assaulted an officer in the course of being detained.
Given every contact was MHA related and he may well have appeared to be seriously mentally at the point of arrest in June 2023, why not arrange an AMHP-led assessment with two doctors. A further reason to consider this might also be that criminal investigations do not always move quickly to criminal charges and if there were any barrier to immediate prosecution, it may well have been necessary to think about MHA admission to protect the public – and that is one of the justifications for sectioning someone who is seriously mentally ill.
PART III MHA
I’ve no idea whether that was the reason, but it’s one commonly heard in other investigative contexts – that people who are seriously mentally ill should be “dealt with under Part III” because of the gravity of the offence.
I often hear this reason is given in London by AMHPs for not assessing some people in police custody and I’ve heard it said elsewhere in my own career several times. Of course, the response assumes there is evidence to charge someone with an offence and circumstances of arrest can vary. The Nottingham suspect was charged on the 16th June, three days after his arrest having been in custody for all three days and it seems evidence to charge was available quite quickly.
But in other homicide investigations on which I was asked to advise about MHA processes and suspects, it has been the case there is not (yet) evidence to charge, yet AMHPs and Doctors have been known to push for prosecution nonetheless. That is something which happened in the handling of Alexander Lewis-Ranwell, for example.
To be continued as the inquiry proceeds …
NB: this is the latest in post about the terrible events in Nottingham, June 2023. You can find all the others collated on a specific Nottingham resources page along with other materials, inc reports and legal documents.
Awarded the President’s Medal, by
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All opinions expressed are my own – they do not represent the views of any organisation.
(c) Michael Brown, 2026
I am not a police officer.
I try to keep this blog up to date, but inevitably over time, amendments to the law as well as court rulings and other findings from inquests and complaints processes mean it is difficult to ensure all the articles and pages remain current. Please ensure you check all legal issues in particular and take appropriate professional advice where necessary.
Government legislation website – www.legislation.gov.uk
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