The enquiry of the coroner must be restricted to the cause of the death of the person upon whom the inquest is taken, and cannot be extended to accessories after the fact. He may, however, inquire of accessories before the fact, for such are instrumental to the death. { 17}
And by the statute 7 George the Fourth, c. 64, sec. 9, “the offence of the person counselling, procuring, or commanding, howsoever indicted, may be inquired of, tried, determined, and punished by any court which shall have jurisdiction to try the principal felon, in the same manner as if such offence had been committed at the same place as the principal felony, although such offence may have been committed either on the high seas, or at any place on land, within his majesty’s dominions or without. And in case the principal felony shall have been committed within the body of any county, and the offence of counselling, procuring, or commanding shall have been committed within the body of any other county, the last-mentioned offence may be inquired of, tried, determined and punished in either of such counties.”
This cursory glance of the office, the election, the authority, and the jurisdiction of coroners, show at once the importance of the trust imposed in them. Yet in the present day negligence and laxity prevail to such an extent, that a coroner’s tribunal is considered an inferior instead of a superior court, for some magistrates though differently elected, endeavour to control their labours, on the plea of economy—and this may be considered as one cause why coroners’ inquests appear unsatisfactory tribunals, for surely the doing so, must interfere with the sacred duties imposed and intended to operate on the minds of the many, that an untimely end of a fellow creature with all the awfulness attending it, should be carefully inquired into as the safety valve by which we live and move, and have our being.
The incomparable Dickens has, in one of the numbers of his present novel, “Bleak House,” sketched a lively representation of the manner in which these courts are commonly conducted; and as fiction demonstrates truthfully, truth itself, it may not be considered an unpardonable liberty in introducing the following extract: