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IPCC investigates custody death

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An investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) into the death of a “vulnerable” man in a police cell has found “staff failed” to protect him.

Andrew David Sheppard, 22, was found dead at Newport Central police station on 30 September 2006.

An inquest into Mr Sheppard’s death also revealed “gross failings” in the system.

Gwent Police has since implemented all eight recommendations made by the IPCC.

Mr Sheppard was detained by police under Section 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983 after “behaving irrationally” on 30 September 2006.

“Those custody staff for a variety of reasons did not keep proper records, did not check on Mr Sheppard with the frequency that they should have done, and nor did they keep him under proper observation”

Tom Davies IPCC Commissioner for Wales

His family had been in contact with police and health professionals on several occasions, that day, to seek advice.

Mr Sheppard, from Newport, was taken to Newport Central police station and detained overnight in a video cell for assessment.

At 10.45am on 1 October, officers went to Mr Sheppard’s cell so that he could be medically assessed by a police surgeon within the custody unit.

The custody officer was concerned about Mr Sheppard’s condition and called for assistance.

Mr Sheppard was taken to the Royal Gwent Hospital and was subsequently pronounced dead.

An inquest into Mr Sheppard’s death, at Newport Coroner’s Court, concluded on Wednesday that he had died from a drugs overdose.

But the jury added there had been “gross failings” in the system, with the “levels of care being contributing factors”.

As the inquest verdict was announced, the Independent Police Complaints Commission concluded that “individual custody staff failed in the performance of their duties” and that Gwent Police custody practices needed revision.

Describing Mr Sheppard as “a very troubled young man”, IPCC Commissioner for Wales Tom Davies extended his sympathies to the family “at what must be a difficult time for them”.

He added that custody staff should have given Mr Sheppard “a place of safety” and that he was owed “a duty of care”, in which staff failed.

“Those custody staff for a variety of reasons did not keep proper records, did not check on Mr Sheppard with the frequency that they should have done, and nor did they keep him under proper observation,” he said.

“Force custody policy at the time was also deficient, as was the management of this particular custody unit.”

He added that police custody is “the wrong place for somebody with mental health problems”, but admitted it is sometimes the only option available.

“However, when a vulnerable person like Andrew Sheppard is taken into custody then we do expect that the measures outlined in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act Codes of Practise, for dealing with detainees, are applied by custody staff,” he said.

“We sought expert forensic analysis which showed that in all probability Mr Sheppard had taken drugs during the time he was in custody, which shows how poor the observation of him had been that night.”

Evidence from the IPCC investigation led to one custody sergeant being fined 13 days pay and three custody sergeants were reprimanded.

Four custody detention officers received management advice, along with one of the police constables who detained Mr Sheppard.

The IPCC made eight recommendations to Gwent Police about its custody policy, which have now been implemented.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Killer’s Stormont job ‘a mistake’

Mary Travers with her father, Tom

My self-doubts

US First Lady Michelle Obama with students from the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School in north London

Pupils asked the First Lady what attracted her to Barack Obama when they met

US First Lady Michelle Obama has told a group of British schoolgirls she knows of their fears for the future because she felt them herself when she was their age.

This was a different kind of transatlantic special relationship.

Michelle Obama was meeting a group of north London secondary schoolgirls, brought to Oxford University to raise their ambitions.

They were pupils from Elizabeth Garrett Anderson in Islington – a school which Mrs Obama visited two years ago on her first solo event as First Lady.

And this time round the venue was the historic hall of Christ Church. It was a kind of Hogwarts – with secret servicemen and TV cameras.

Under the oil-painted gazes of former collegians, all very dead, white males, Mrs Obama told the schoolgirls that they had to break through all the barriers of prejudice and self doubt.

“The dresses, the cars, the horses, the carriages… I can watch that on TV”

Michelle Obama

She had faced the same doubts about “fitting in” when she went to college, she said. “Doubts don’t go away, you just learn to deal with them.”

It would be easy to be cynical about this type of motivational team-talk. But Mrs Obama really seemed to connect with these youngsters. It was a curiously intimate, relaxed, animated conversation, despite the cameras and the control-freakery of the security.

She told them “don’t be afraid to fail, don’t be afraid to take chances”. She told them to take the message that they shouldn’t be intimidated from applying to places such as Oxford.

These were girls from a secondary school where most pupils qualify for free school meals, where 59 different languages are spoken, one in five are refugees or asylum seekers, where 91% of pupils are from ethnic minorities.

Christ Church, this one single college, had produced 13 prime ministers, some of whom were looking down sombrely from their portraits on the walls.

These girls had come to visit Oxford University as part of the university’s attempt to open doors and young minds to the idea that academic excellence isn’t the same thing as social elitism.

Michelle Obama answers students' questions in Christ Church dining hall

Addressing the youngsters, Mrs Obama said “How are you doing? It’s good to see you again”

The university spends a great deal of thought – and gets plenty of grief – over the question of how it selects the youngsters with the greatest potential.

But one of the girls wanted to know about Mrs Obama’s talent spotting skills. Did Barack Obama look like presidential material when she met him?

What attracted her, she said, was the fact that he was different from the career-driven, money-hungry lawyers around them.

She liked that he was funny and smart, a “voracious reader”, “not impressed with himself” and “low key”. She also highlighted the strength of his relationship with his mother and that he got on well with women.

The schoolgirls wanted to know what life was like in the presidential family.

She told them about its surreal contrasts. Buckingham Palace one night, watching soccer and checking homework the next.

Maybe she’d already seen one motorcade too many, as she told the girls the whole point of the presidency was to help young people such as themselves.

“The dresses, the cars, the horses, the carriages… I can watch that on TV,” she told them with a shrug.

It all seemed very genuine and unrehearsed as the girls queued for an individual First Lady hug. It had been a disarmingly warm show of support for these girls.

Then they waved her off, as she drove away in a convoy of seven heavily armoured cars, rumbling slowly across the ancient quadrangle.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

The blast may have occurred a mere 520 million years after the Big Bang

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A cataclysmic explosion of a huge star near the edge of the observable Universe may be the most distant single object yet spied by a telescope.

Scientists believe the blast, which was detected by Nasa’s Swift space observatory, occurred a mere 520 million years after the Big Bang.

This means its light has taken a staggering 13.14 billion years to reach Earth.

Details of the discovery will appear shortly in the Astrophysical Journal.

The event, which was picked up by Swift in April 2009, is referred to by astronomers using the designation GRB 090429B.

The “GRB” stands for “gamma-ray burst” – a sudden pulse of very high-energy light that the telescope is tuned to find on the sky.

These bursts are usually associated with extremely violent processes, such as the end-of-life collapse of giant stars.

“It would have been a huge star, perhaps 30 times the mass of our Sun,” said lead researcher Dr Antonino Cucchiara from the University of California, Berkeley.

“We do not have enough information to claim this was one of the so-called ‘Population III” stars, which are the very first generation of stars in the Universe. But certainly we are in the earliest phases of star formation,” he told BBC News.

Swift, as its name implies, has to act quickly to catch gamma-ray flashes because they will register for only a few minutes.

Fortunately, an afterglow at longer wavelengths will persist sometimes for days, which allows follow-up observations by other telescopes that can then determine distance.

It was this afterglow analysis that established another burst in the week previous to GRB 090429B to be at a separation from Earth of 13.04 billion light-years, making it temporarily the “most distant object in the Universe”.

The event was picked up in April 2009 by Nasa’s Swift telescope

This other event (GRB 090423) was reported fairly soon after its occurrence, but it has taken astronomers two years to come back with a confident assessment that an even greater expanse lies between Earth and GRB 090429B.

There are other competing candidates for the title of “most distant object”. Hubble, for example, was given much more powerful instruments during its final astronaut servicing mission in 2009, and teams working on new images from the famous space telescope have seen galaxies that look not far short of GRB 090429B – and potentially even further out.

It should be stated, of course, that in these sorts of observations, there is always a degree of uncertainty.

Hubble’s targets were galaxies – collections of stars; and GRB 090429B is the signature of a single event, a single star. So, in that sense, it might be considered apart.

Scientists are very keen to probe these great distances because they will learn how the early Universe evolved, and that will help them explain why the cosmos looks the way it does now.

They are particularly keen to trace the very first populations of stars. These hot, blue giants would have grown out of the cold neutral gas that pervaded the young cosmos.

These behemoths would have burnt brilliant but brief lives, producing the very first heavy elements.

Their intense ultra-violet light would also have “fried” the neutral gas around them – ripping electrons off atoms – to produce the diffuse intergalactic plasma we still detect between nearby stars today.

A GAMMA-RAY BURST RECIPE

Impression of a star explosion (ESO/A. Roquette)

Models assume GRBs arise when giant stars burn out and collapseDuring collapse, super-fast jets of matter burst out from the starsCollisions occur with gas already shed by the dying behemothsThe interaction generates the energetic signals detected by SwiftRemnants of the huge stars end their days as black holes

So, apart from its status as a potential record-breaker, GRB 090429B is of intense interest because it is embedded directly in this time period – the “epoch of re-ionisation”, as astronomers call it.

Whether GRB 090429B was one of the very first stars to shine in the Universe is doubtful, as Dr Cucchiara states. There may be several generations before it.

But Swift will keep looking, and it is ideally suited for the purpose, explains co-researcher Dr Paul O’Brien from the University of Leicester, UK.

“By finding the most distant objects we get an estimate, of course, of when the first objects formed,” he told BBC News. “But then if you can find a location on the sky – in this case of a single star – you can go and look for the galaxy this object is presumably in, and you can start to study the very first galaxies.

“Because gamma-rays can get right through dust, this gives you a good, unbiased way of finding those first galaxies. One could just find very bright galaxies, whereas Swift means we can find the smaller galaxies, too. It was all of these objects that grew up to form the Universe we see around us today. If you think in terms of a human lifespan, it’s about understanding what the Universe was like as a toddler.”

The Swift mission was launched in 2004. It is a US space agency-managed venture but has a big UK and Italian contribution.

Britain’s major input has been to provide an X-ray camera and elements of the satellite’s Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope.A cataclysmic explosion of a huge star near the edge of the observable Universe may be the most distant single object yet spied by a telescope.

GRB 090429B (Gemini Observatory /AURA / Levan, Tanvir, Cucchiara)

Observations made at longer wavelengths – as in this infrared image of GRB 090429B taken by the Gemini North Telescope – are used to work out the distance

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This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.