In the first week of July 2010, a man was killed and two other people were seriously injured in Tyneside and Northumberland. The man who died was Chris Brown, aged 29. The two who survived were the former partner of Raoul Moat and a police constable on duty near Newcastle. Raoul Moat, who was 37, died by suicide on July 10, 2010. He was never charged and never tried, so no court has convicted anyone of Mr. Brown's death in his name.
The law gives the case two separate endings. An inquest into Moat's own death, held in Newcastle in 2011, returned a verdict of suicide. A later inquest into the death of Christopher Brown, in December 2013, recorded a conclusion of "unlawful killing". In between, two men who had helped Moat were tried and convicted at Newcastle Crown Court.
On July 3, 2010 Chris Brown was killed at Birtley, in Gateshead. He was 29. Police and the courts described him as the new partner of Moat's former partner, and she was seriously injured in the same events but survived. Northumbria Police's chief constable later described what happened to Mr. Brown as "cowardly, unprovoked".
On July 4, 2010, shortly after midnight, a police constable was seriously injured while on duty near Newcastle. He was 44 and had joined Northumbria Police in 2000. He survived.
Northumbria Police and other forces pursued the inquiry in the days that followed. Moat died on July 10, 2010 in Northumberland. The inquest jury later found that he had died by suicide.
Two men were arrested in July 2010 and tried at Newcastle Crown Court in a trial that lasted five weeks. They were Karl Ness, then 26, from Dudley in North Tyneside, and Qhuram Awan, then 23, from Blyth in Northumberland.
On March 11, 2011 the jury returned unanimous verdicts. Both men were convicted of conspiracy to murder, attempted murder and robbery. Karl Ness was also convicted of a further offense, of which the jury cleared Qhuram Awan. The jury found that both men had conspired with Moat before, during and after the events in which one man was killed and two others were seriously injured. The conspiracy to murder concerned police officers, and the attempted murder concerned the police constable.
The two men were sentenced on March 15, 2011. Karl Ness received a life sentence with a minimum term of 40 years. Qhuram Awan received a life sentence with a minimum term of 20 years.
The inquest into Raoul Moat's death sat at Newcastle Crown Court with a jury for about three weeks in September 2011. On September 27, 2011 the jury returned a unanimous verdict of suicide. It found that he had meant to take his own life.
The jury also made findings about the police operation. It found that the officers involved were properly trained.
A senior police officer told the inquest that he would have preferred Moat to be taken alive.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission published its findings on September 27, 2011, the day the inquest jury returned its verdict. It had examined the police response in the final day before his death on July 10, 2010.
The commission said there was no evidence that any police officer had committed misconduct. It said there were lessons for Northumbria Police, particularly in the handling of the final negotiations, and that important evidence had been lost because the equipment used to record them was inadequate. It found that the officers' main aim was to keep Moat alive and that there was no evidence that police action had caused his death.
A separate report on how Northumbria Police handled intelligence passed to it about Moat's intentions was held back. The commission said it could not be released while the coroner's work on Mr. Brown's death was continuing.
The second inquest took place in Newcastle in December 2013. It examined how information about Moat's intentions had been handled by the authorities before July 2010. A counsel for the chief constable of Northumbria Police appeared at the hearing, and an official from the prison service told the inquest that he had passed Moat's intentions to his superiors and that no action had followed.
The coroner concluded that Christopher Brown had been unlawfully killed. He said he was not satisfied that the information that had been available "was used appropriately". He also found that the authorities had not known the precise risk Moat posed, and that the failures to act on the information did not cause or contribute to Mr. Brown's death. Northumbria Police said the coroner had accepted that its officers' actions had not caused or contributed to it.
The conclusion of unlawful killing does not name a person. The Chief Coroner's guidance, issued in 2021, says that a conclusion of unlawful killing is available where it is more likely than not that murder, manslaughter or infanticide caused the death, that a conclusion may not name the person responsible, and that a coroner must not frame a determination so that it appears to decide criminal liability for a named person.
An inquest in England is a coroner's inquiry into who a dead person was and how, when and where they died. It is not a trial. It uses the civil standard of proof, the balance of probabilities, which the Supreme Court confirmed for all inquest conclusions in November 2020. In the Moat case the difference mattered, because a criminal trial could not take place once he had died, and the only legal finding about Mr. Brown's death was the inquest conclusion of unlawful killing.
The criminal court dealt only with the men who were alive to be charged. Their convictions for conspiracy to murder, attempted murder and robbery rest on the jury's findings that they conspired with Moat across the period of the events.
The police constable died in February 2012, aged 44, in Northumberland. Northumbria Police said at the time that no one else was being sought. In July 2020 his twin brother marked the tenth anniversary of the events.
Moat was never charged, and no jury was asked to decide whether he was guilty of any offense. What the courts said about his part in the events came through the trial of the two men who helped him and through the inquests, and the inquests did not decide criminal guilt.
The inquest in December 2013 found that the information held before July 2010 had not been used appropriately, but it also found that the failures did not cause or contribute to Mr. Brown's death. Both findings are the coroner's own.
July 3, 2010: Chris Brown, 29, is killed at Birtley, Gateshead. His partner, Moat's former partner, is seriously injured.
July 4, 2010: A police constable is seriously injured on duty near Newcastle.
July 10, 2010: Moat dies by suicide in Northumberland.
March 11, 2011: Karl Ness and Qhuram Awan are convicted at Newcastle Crown Court.
March 15, 2011: Ness is sentenced to life with a minimum of 40 years; Awan to life with a minimum of 20 years.
September 27, 2011: The inquest jury returns a verdict of suicide on Moat; the Independent Police Complaints Commission publishes its findings.
February 2012: The police constable dies.
December 2013: The inquest into the death of Christopher Brown concludes with "unlawful killing".