A London coroner has been formally reprimanded for publicising a letter in which she alleged that she was being bullied by the Orthodox Jewish community.
Mary Hassell, senior coroner for inner north London, “demonstrated a serious lack of judgement” when she released to a newspaper a letter she had written to a local authority asking for protection against intimidation, according to the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office.
Ms Hassell has been involved in a long-running dispute with the Charedi community over postmortems and delays in releasing bodies for burial.
Last summer the High Court supported a Jewish family who had resisted an order from the coroner for an invasive autopsy on a relative instead of a scan.
Letters of complaint to the JCIO said that Ms Hassell had made unsubstantiated allegations in her letter.
The JCIO said that after a detailed investigation, the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice were ”satisfied that Coroner Hassell had not misrepresented or distorted the position in her letter as alleged and have dismissed this aspect of the complaint”.
But it found that her disclosure of a private letter amounted to misconduct.
Rabbi Asher Gratt, of the Adath Yisroel Burial Society, said that the reprimand “ought to be a signal that it is time for her to step down or at the very least to be moved to an area where she might cause less controversy.”
Rabbi Gratt said the dismissal of the complaint that the letter had misrepresented facts was likely to be appealed.
