Coroner: Solicitor mislead head of CCO
A solicitor coroner has been struck off for understating the seriousness of a criminal investigation he was facing when reporting it to the Chief Coroner’s Office (CCO).
Chinyere Inyama told a Mr Parker, the head of the CCO, that he was accused of “touching up” a client from when he was in private practice, when in fact the allegations were of rape and sexual assault.
After a police investigation, no charges were brought against Mr Inyama.
The solicitor, born in 1961, qualified in 1993. He was in private practice as a mental health solicitor for a decade before becoming an assistant deputy coroner and, in 2011, a senior coroner, latterly for the West London coroner area.
Mr Parker, who had been told by the police what the allegations were, reported Mr Inyama to the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office (JCIO) due to concerns that the solicitor was trying to mislead him by minimising the seriousness of the allegations.
He was ultimately dismissed as a coroner in February 2023.
Mr Inyama told the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) that he had said there was an ongoing investigation and that the matter had been referred to RASSO (the police unit that investigates allegations of rape and serious sexual assault).
This made it clear, he said, that the allegations were serious in nature.
His description of the allegations as ‘touching up’ reflected his wish “to avoid the embarrassment and shame at the nature of the allegations”.
It was “not rehearsed”, he went on, and not an attempt to shape the narrative to Mr Parker.
The SDT rejected this. Even if Mr Inyama had referred to sexual assault and a referral to RASSO (Mr Parker had not recorded these), “those references were not such that they would alter the minimising nature of his description of the allegations”.
It went on: “There was nothing to suggest that Mr Parker would have understood the acronym RASSO, or that he would have understood that what was being investigated were offences that were significantly more serious than ‘touching up’.”
The SDT said Mr Inyama failed to comply with his duty to provide a full and frank account of the allegations he was facing and it did not matter that he knew the police were in direct communication with the CCO.
In mitigation, the tribunal found that this was “a single episode of brief duration” and Mr Inyama had self-reported to the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
But it rejected his submission that striking him off the roll – the usual sanction in cases of dishonesty – would be disproportionate.
“Whilst this was a one-off episode, it was an instance of dishonesty from a senior judicial office holder. Mr Justice Cobb [for the JCIO] regarded Mr Inyama’s actions as being ‘the most serious form of judicial misconduct’. The tribunal agreed.
“The tribunal rejected Mr Inyama’s submission that this was a ‘moment of madness’. This was a deliberate act by Mr Inyama, calculated to minimise the serious nature of the allegations.”
This outweighed “his personal difficulties and personal mitigation” and so the SDT decided he should be struck off.
Mr Inyama was also ordered to pay costs of £15,000.
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