THE KAIAPOI INQUEST.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2254, 19 May 1881, Page 3

THE KAIAPOI INQUEST.

TO THE BDITOB OF THE PEBS3. Slß,—The purport of your correspondent “ Puncture’s ” letter is very evident. His quotations from Judge Johnston’s guide book are quite one-sided. He carefully abstains from giving extracts likely to demolish his own arguments, nor does he go beyond the Judge’s book in his attempts to demonstrate what the law is. I will supply the omission. As the law stands, no one can bury a dead body without either a certificate of burial from a Registrar of Deaths, or a warrant to bury—either with or without inquest—from a coroner. As Dr. Ovenden declined to give the Registrar of Deaths a certificate that the infant had died from natural causes, it was not in the power of the latter to issue a burial certificate. Hence it became necessary for the police to inform the coroner of the facts. The coroner was perfectly right in what he did, whether what he said at the inquest was equally correct or not. Now as to Judge Johnston’s guide-book. Why did not “Puncture ” quote the following, whioh must have stared him in the face when he opened the book :—“ It (the Inquisition) must also, for purposes of identification, describe the dead person either by name, if that can be proved, or if not, as a ‘ person unknown.’ ” And as, for purposes of their own, certain parties concerned were putting obstacles in the way of tho coroner, for the purpose of preventing him from seeing the law carried out, what else could that gentleman do in the execution of his duties but try to remove these obstacles in the usual way. Had the “ case ” been one in which poor people, and not persons of high social standing, were concerned, why not a word would have been said ; and, perhaps, had the body been buried on a blank certificate of cause of death, it would have been quickly whipped out of the coffin and duly inquested. Of course in such a case no three nurses—one in her turn at a time !—nor lawyers’ pen and especial agency, nor letters from “ Puncture,” would have been employed. But the coroner’s jury, unempannelled, would have given ont in chorus—- “ Rattle his bones Over the stones: He is only a pauper, That nobody owns.” Lex.