Sister loses action over soldier who choked to death on the floor of Hull police station

THIRTEEN years after Christopher Alder died on the floor of a Hull police station, his sister yesterday heard a judge share her concerns about the standard of the investigation which followed.

But the same judge, Penelope Belcher, comprehensively rejected Janet Alder’s complaints of racial discrimination by the Crown Prosecution Service, which had its case against five police officers thrown out of court in 2002. The CPS had alleged manslaughter by neglect and misconduct in public office, on the basis of an investigation by West Yorkshire Police into the Humberside force’s conduct on the night Mr Alder, a former soldier and mature student, aged 37, was dragged into Queen’s Gardens police station unconscious in April 1998.

Judge Belcher heard Miss Alder’s civil action against the CPS over 12 days in the county court in Leeds last September and delivered her judgement in Leeds Crown Court yesterday.

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She said: “I understand and share Miss Alder’s concern of the possibility that racial discrimination played some part in the actions of police officers on the night Christopher Alder died. I also understand and share her concerns as to the standard of the investigation by West Yorkshire Police into the actions of the Humberside officers.

“However, she has failed to satisfy me, on the balance of probability, that the actions by the Crown Prosecution Service involved racial discrimination in their dealings with her. It falls that her action is dismissed.”

The judge said Miss Alder, 49, currently living in Halifax, had expected too much of the CPS. It had to decide what stood a chance of being accepted as evidence in court. She wanted it to answer all the questions arising from her suspicions that her older brother might have been assaulted in the police van which took him to Queens Gardens from Hull Royal Infirmary.

He had been taken there with injuries caused when he was punched and fell to the floor outside a night club.

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When he died, he was missing a tooth which was only loose at the hospital and had other injuries not recorded at the hospital. His belt was also inexplicably missing. In 2001, an inquest jury recorded a verdict of “unlawful killing”. The majority view of medical experts was that he could have had a fit in the police van but there was no way of telling which injuries he had sustained there and which in the original fight.

Judge Bulcher said Miss Alder, who conducted her own case after running out of legal aid, had established that the CPS could not say if the police officers who picked up her brother from the hospital had been questioned about what happened on the way to Queens Gardens.

She had also pointed to missed opportunities to investigate the possible use of CS gas and to hints of racialism in videotaped talk at the police station, which had been overlooked or dismissed.

But the CPS had had difficult decisions to make, said the judge. Miss Alder was “plainly an intelligent and highly articulate individual” but she and her supporters had been difficult to deal with. There was no evidence the CPS would have done differently if Miss Alder and her brother were white.

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Miss Alder said: “I thank you for your judgment. But I don’t believe it is a fair representation of the case I put forward and I do feel it is biased.”

Afterwards, she said: “It was what I expected. It is the same system. I don’t know where I go from here. I have to think about it.”

She is still in discussion with the civil rights organisation Liberty about taking a case against the UK government to the European courts. Meanwhile, she has to wait to see if the CPS will pursue its entitlement to costs – still unspecified.