Illegal-killing verdict is overturned

DENIS LIVESLEY

A TRAINEE vet whose car fatally struck an Oldham tow-truck driver by the side of a motorway has triumphed in her ground-breaking legal fight to overturn an inquest verdict that he was “unlawfully killed”.

Denis Livesley (60), of Leesbrook, was loading a crashed Volvo on to his vehicle on a slipway of the M60 near Sale in December 2009 when Sophie Wilkinson’s Volkswagen Golf skidded on ice and ploughed into him.

The grandfather of eight was dead on arrival at Trafford General Hospital.

Miss Wilkinson was not charged with any offence - her car had skidded in dreadful weather conditions at the same place as the Volvo Mr Livesey was preparing to move.

But at a later inquest the jury returned the verdict that Mr Livesley had been unlawfully killed - prompting Miss Wilkinson’s legal challenge.

Yesterday, Mr Justice Foskett and Judge Peter Thornton QC said the coroner was wrong to leave the option of such a verdict to the jury and broke new legal ground by ruling that in future such verdicts should be confined to cases of murder, manslaughter and infanticide.

Barrister James Maxwell-Scott said Miss Wilkinson felt passionately that unlawful-killing verdicts should not be available in such cases because they risked turning inquests into a “fault-finding exercise or trial”.

She had invested “considerable strength of personal feeling” in the case, he said, funding her High Court challenge herself.

OUR website carries heavily edited versions of stories only available in full in our print and eChron editions