Peter Lownds

Inquests & Public Inquiries

Peter has considerable experience in dealing with inquests. This includes representing interested persons into deaths caused by deliberate criminal acts, deaths in prisons, deaths in healthcare settings, and other cases involving workplace accidents.

He has acted at inquests for families of the bereaved, employers and individual professional workers.

The experience he gained from previously working as a clinical negligence solicitor, and as a legal adviser to a leading teaching trade union, has equipped him with sensitive client care skills and invaluable insight into workplace environments and the working lives of busy professionals.

His cases in 2022 have included representing a psychiatrist at an inquest concerning the death of a child deliberately killed by a mentally ill man who drove his car into a group of children leaving a school. In July 2022 he represented a GP at an inquest into the deaths of a family in which the father shot and killed his partner and their two young daughters before shooting himself.

In another notable case, in 2021 he represented the family of a man who died following being physically restrained on the floor of a public house by customers. The case was adjourned part way through the proceedings after the coroner invited the police to re-open a criminal investigation. The adjournment followed Peter’s cross-examination of the forensic pathologist and one of the men involved in the restraint.

He has also acted as counsel on two major independent inquiries into homicides committed by patients with mental health problems.