Bob Jones on coroners

Bob Jones writes in the NZ Herald regard the Coroner saying coke should have warning labels:

We read this sort of coroner guff frequently following unusual deaths in which, not content to simply do their job and officially state the cause of death, they instead ignore the extreme oddity of the circumstances and ascribe them to the community at large.

A circus elephant escapes, runs amok and tramples someone to death and the coroner will urge that the government makes us all build elephant-proof fences. A 158kg woman rolls over in bed in a drunken stupor and crushes to death her ex-jockey husband. This actually happened in Tasmania in the late 1980s.

Coroner Crear presumably would urge the government to ban jockeys and other small males sleeping with fat women, or alternatively, that fat women have a warning sign tattooed on their buttocks. In short, coroners too often fail to recognise freak accidents as simply that, namely freak.

Heh, so true.

Older readers will remember George Wilder who delighted us all with his prison escapes. Who can forget his escape from a Taranaki prison when the army was called in from Waiouru to assist prison officers and police searching for him on the central plateau where he had been spotted. Because they occasionally ran across hikers, at day’s end the searchers were shown a photo of George. “That bugger was here all day in the search party”, they all shouted, but too late, George had slipped off into the night.

George wasn’t publicly perceived as a villain, rather he was viewed as an addiction victim for his obsession with taking cars, riding about in them for half an hour then leaving them unharmed. He simply couldn’t stop himself despite endless court warnings. Coroner Crear would doubtless blame the car manufacturers and Professor Sellman would want cars added to the addictive substances list.

Highly likely! They always blame the company.