Inquest Faults London Officer in 2009 Death During Protests

 

Now, two years later, a jury in an official inquest has reached a damning conclusion. After hearing five weeks of evidence contradicting the original account, it determined on Tuesday that Mr. Tomlinson had in fact been “unlawfully killed” by the “excessive and unreasonable” behavior of the police officer who hit him, Police Constable Simon Harwood.

As a result of Constable Harwood’s attack, the jury said, “Mr. Tomlinson suffered internal bleeding, which led to his collapse within a few minutes and his subsequent death.”

The case has been a cause célèbre since the death of Mr. Tomlinson, a newspaper vendor whose fatal encounter with an angry army of police officers took place as he tried to make his way home during the sometimes-violent protests against a Group of 20 meeting on April 1, 2009. The verdict was a huge embarrassment for the police, which have been repeatedly accused of using excessive force against peaceful demonstrators and of being unable to control violent protesters, and who seemed to be doing their best to avoid taking responsibility for Mr. Tomlinson’s death.

Mr. Tomlinson, an alcoholic who had liver disease, had a number of peaceful encounters that evening with the police, who stopped him repeatedly as he walked, slowly and not very steadily, through London’s financial district.

One officer, Police Constable Andrew Brown, said that he encountered Mr. Tomlinson “shuffling” toward a police cordon against a backdrop of fires, smoke and rocks being thrown by the protesters. “He was staring vacantly towards the demonstration,” Constable Brown told the inquest. “I explained why he could not get through. He said he needed to get to West Smithfield where he lived — he needed to work in the morning.”

A few minutes later, Mr. Tomlinson was standing with his hands in his pockets when a line of police officers clearing the area of protesters told him to get back. It was then that Constable Harwood, who told the inquest that he was panicking at the mounting violence and who had already had several altercations with people in the crowd, ran forward.

Mr. Tomlinson had already begun to move away when Constable Harwood hit him in the left thigh with his baton and then pushed him hard on his shoulder. Mr. Tomlinson fell to the ground. He got up and wandered unsteadily for a short time before collapsing again, unconscious. He died soon afterward.

The police at first said that their only contact with Mr. Tomlinson involved trying to help him. But the push was captured on video by a bystander, Chris La Jaunie, an investment banker in New York. Six days later, he released the video to The Guardian, which posted it online.

A police pathologist — who has been suspended twice for failings in other postmortem examinations — concluded that Mr. Tomlinson had had a fatal heart attack. But several experts testified at the inquest that he had in fact died from internal bleeding.

Rose Fitzpatrick, deputy assistant commissioner for the Metropolitan Police, called the verdict a “matter of deep regret” and said the department would begin misconduct proceedings against Constable Harwood. But Mr. Tomlinson’s family said the officer should face criminal prosecution.

“We’ve been let down for two years,” Paul King, one of Mr. Tomlinson’s nine children, said after the verdict. He said that the verdict was “a bit of closure,” but that “we’d like to go to court and continue with the manslaughter charges.”

The Crown Prosecution Service, which originally declined to prosecute anyone in the case, said Tuesday that it would review its decision in light of the inquest.

Constable Harwood denied that he had intended to harm Mr. Tomlinson. The officer “did not intend, or foresee at the time, that his push would cause Mr. Tomlinson to fall over, let alone that it would result in any injury,” Constable Harwood’s lawyer said in a statement.

Jenny Jones, a member of the London Assembly from the Green Party, referred to several cases in which unarmed civilians were killed by police officers, including that of Jean Charles de Menezes. Mr. Menezes, a Brazilian man, was shot dead days after the subway bombings of July 2005 by officers who mistook him for a terrorist after a series of blunders. No officer was prosecuted in the case.

“Ian Tomlinson’s death must not join that list,” she said.

 

World Bank Faults Itself for East Timor’s Struggles

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WASHINGTON — A frank evaluation by the World Bank’s internal auditors of a decade of efforts to help East Timor underscores the challenges facing international organizations trying to assist struggling nations.

The draft report, not yet released publicly, assigns much of the blame for slow progress in East Timor, which emerged in 1999 after a quarter-century struggle for independence from Indonesia, to the World Bank itself.

But it also illustrates the problems that arise as development agencies try to meet urgent needs while ensuring that donors’ money is not misspent.

The review by the auditors, the Independent Evaluation Group, which reports directly to World Bank directors, covers the period from 2000 to 2010. Among its findings are that the bank delayed the opening of four desperately needed hospitals for a year because it adhered too rigidly to its own procurement rules, even though East Timor’s child mortality rate was among the highest in Southeast Asia and life expectancy was barely over 55.

The report also says efforts to support education were unsatisfactory. The bank did help build and repair schools. But at the request of the new government, which was trying to dismantle the Indonesian education system, it distributed teaching materials in Portuguese, which had been the main language of instruction before the Indonesian occupation, when Timor was a Portuguese colony.

The new government restored Portuguese as an official language along with Tetum, an indigenous language. But Portuguese was spoken by only 5 percent of the population, and few younger teachers could understand the materials.

It might have been more useful, the report says, to have developed texts in English or indigenous languages.

One result, the bank’s report says, was that by 2009, more than 70 percent of the students tested at the end of the first grade “could not read a single word” of a simple text in Portuguese, “a dismal record after 10 years of efforts.”

The report asserts that at the urging of the bank — which provides loans to developing countries with the explicit goal of fighting poverty — East Timor saved too much of its petroleum revenues rather than spend them on social projects, an approach that contributed to high levels of poverty.

Poverty in East Timor, already at a rate twice that of Indonesia’s level, “rose significantly through most of the evaluation period and declined only after 2007, when the government, against bank advice, increased its spending using petroleum resources,” the report states.

Ferid Belhaj, the World Bank’s director for East Timor, said it was against the bank’s policy to comment on an evaluation that was not final. But he said the country had made “tremendous progress” in the past decade, building or rehabilitating 637 schools and helping to increase life expectancy to 61 in 2008, from 56 in 2000.

When East Timor became independent, an estimated 70 percent of its economic infrastructure had been destroyed in years of fighting.

“It’s a lot easier to look backwards,” said Scott Guggenheim, a former World Bank adviser who worked in East Timor. “The country had been burned down. You had half the population in refugee camps.”

Difficult compromises are often necessary, specialists say.

“You are going to want to try to move as quickly as possible, even though you recognize that maybe some things are going to be used less efficiently,” said Michael Morfit, a professor at Georgetown University who worked in Indonesia for the United States Agency for International Development. “You just accept that as the trade-off.”

The case of the Portuguese school texts in East Timor poses a somewhat different challenge: knowing when to resist policies if they seem ill advised.

 

Group Faults the F.D.A. on Oversight of Devices

The Food and Drug Administration is allowing some high-risk devices like artificial hips to be sold without strenuous testing, despite promises that it would address regulatory issues affecting them, a federal watchdog group plans to testify on Wednesday.

The group, the Government Accountability Office, found that the F.D.A. has taken some recent steps to determine if certain high-risk medical devices should undergo more testing before being sold. But in the meantime, it is continuing to approve dozens of such devices annually with scant review, exposing patients to risks.

An official with the office is expected to give the testimony on Wednesday at a hearing before the Senate Special Committee on Aging. The office will also present its preliminary findings of what it concluded were shortcomings in how the F.D.A. oversees recalls of troubled devices.

A spokeswoman for the F.D.A., Karen Riley, said that officials there had not seen the G.A.O. testimony and so could not respond directly to it. She added that F.D.A officials planned to testify at the hearing. The panel is also expected to hear from patient advocates and industry representatives.

Among other issues, the Senate hearing is expected to examine the approval and marketing of a now-recalled artificial hip sold by Johnson & Johnson known as the A.S.R., or Articular Surface Replacement. An article last December in The New York Times detailed how the medical products giant continued to sell the hip despite repeated reports by physicians abroad that it was faulty.

The F.D.A. permitted Johnson & Johnson to sell the artificial hip without conducting clinical trials. A few years after implant, it began disintegrating in patients, shedding metallic debris that has left some patients crippled.

According to reports by doctors in England, the device may fail prematurely in about 50 percent of the patients receiving it.

The F.D.A. has two separate procedures for approving medical devices.

For devices that pose a lower level of risk to patients, a manufacturer need only show that a new product is substantially equivalent to one already on the market. For devices that are more critical, like implanted heart defibrillators, producers have to run clinical trials to win approval.

But some categories of high-risk products like artificial hips and external defibrillators that were already on the market when the F.D.A. began to regulate devices can still enter the market through the less-rigorous pathway. Safety advocates have long urged the F.D.A. to close that loophole.

In 2009, the G.A.O. issued a report recommending that the F.D.A. reclassify such devices either into the high-risk category, the one requiring more testing, or in lower-risk categories that do not require testing. The agency has started to do so, but to date it has not made final decisions for nearly all those products.

At the start of the Obama administration, F.D.A. officials indicated that they would take an aggressive approach to the regulation of medical devices. But in more recent months, they appear to have backed away from that stance.

The F.D.A. has asked the Institute of Medicine to review its device approval process. That group is expected to issue its report later this year.