The Empty Chair in the Sturgess Courtroom: What Witness Absences Reveal

An inquest courtroom is not a criminal trial. There is no dock, no defendant and no prosecution. But there is still an empty chair whenever a witness who could illuminate a death does not appear. In the Dawn Sturgess inquest, the absences matter not because they are unusual but because they shape what the public can hear tested in open court.

Dawn Sturgess died in July 2018 after exposure to Novichok. The legal and political questions surrounding her death are unusually wide. They reach into policing, emergency response, scientific assessment and the conduct of foreign states. An inquest cannot answer all of them. Its statutory task is narrower. Yet the choice of who gives live evidence determines how far the coroner can probe the answers that are within scope.

The legal architecture of absence

Inquest law does not require every person with knowledge to appear in person. The coroner controls the witness list. Written statements can be admitted. Evidence may be read rather than given orally. Some material may be subject to restrictions, public interest immunity or closed proceedings. Witnesses abroad may be outside the court’s reach. Others may be excused for health, security or practical reasons.

These are not loopholes. They are part of a system designed to balance fairness, national security and the practical limits of an inquisitorial process. But the legal propriety of an absence does not remove its consequences. A written statement cannot be asked a follow-up question. A closed session cannot be reported. A witness who never appears cannot be observed, challenged or asked to explain a contradiction in public.

Categories of absence

The gaps in the Sturgess record fall into recognisable categories. First, there are witnesses outside the jurisdiction. The Russian nationals identified by UK authorities as suspects in the Salisbury poisonings are not expected to appear. Extradition is not available in practice. Their absence is legally predictable but politically significant: it marks the limit of what a domestic inquest can compel.

Second, there are officials and former officials who provided written evidence only. A written statement may be detailed and truthful. It may also be drafted with legal advice and stripped of context. Live questioning by the coroner and interested persons is the main mechanism for testing that context. When senior decision-makers do not appear, the public may reasonably ask whether the inquest saw the evidence or only the paperwork.

Third, there are experts whose reports stand as evidence but who did not give oral testimony. Expert evidence is often technical and slow. Reading it into the record may be efficient. But scientific conclusions about exposure, toxicity and causation are precisely the kind of evidence that benefits from examination. If the experts are not questioned, the coroner must work harder to ensure the record is intelligible.

Fourth, there are institutional witnesses. An agency cannot testify; a representative can. The distinction matters. A representative may speak to policy but not to individual decisions. The inquest may hear from a body without hearing from the person who made the critical judgment.

Why live testimony matters

Live testimony is not valuable because of demeanour alone. It is valuable because it allows questions to be asked in sequence. A witness can be taken to a document, asked to explain a gap, and pressed on an inconsistency. Interested persons can put their case. The coroner can clarify. The public can follow.

Written evidence can do some of this. It cannot do all of it. In an inquest where the central questions concern how a person came into contact with a nerve agent and how the state responded, the difference between a statement and a witness box is the difference between an account and an interrogation of that account.

The political dimension

Absence is not only a legal category. It is a political fact. If senior officials, intelligence figures or agency leads do not appear, the public may conclude that accountability is being managed rather than examined. That conclusion may be unfair in individual cases. It is nonetheless predictable when the reasons for absence are not clearly explained.

The coroner’s rulings on witnesses are therefore part of the public record. They should be reasoned and published where possible. If a witness is excused, the public should know why. If evidence is admitted in writing only, the decision should be explained. Transparency about the absence is the next best thing to the presence itself.

What the gaps mean for the central questions

The Sturgess inquest can still make findings without every witness. Documents, expert reports and written statements may be sufficient to answer the statutory questions. The coroner can also issue a Prevention of Future Deaths report. But the gaps affect the quality of the public account. They limit the testing of evidence. They leave room for suspicion. They make it harder for the family and the public to feel that the central questions were asked directly of those who might answer them.

That does not mean the inquest is a failure. It means the record must be read with its absences in view. A conclusion reached without live testimony from key actors is not necessarily wrong. It is, however, a conclusion that depends more heavily on documents and on the coroner’s assessment of them.

A test for the record

The test is not whether every absent witness can be compelled. Many cannot. The test is whether the reasons for absence are made clear, whether the evidence they might have given is available in another form, and whether the coroner has done enough to test it. The empty chair should not be hidden. It should be explained.

For a public-interest inquest, that explanation is part of the accountability. The Sturgess record will be judged not only by who appeared but by how honestly the gaps were acknowledged.