This ground breaking case is the first in which the Court has authorised the withdrawal of  artificial nutrition and hydration (ANH) from an incapable patient who, although in a state of very reduced consciousness, is clinically stable and still exhibiting some awareness. The decision puts the autonomy of the patient firmly at the heart of judicial decision making: as the judge remarks this is not a case about the right to die but concerns the right of this unfortunate woman to live her life at the end of her days in a way that she would have wished.

Respect for her human dignity and her freedom overwhelms the presumption that there should be any further prolongation of her life.

Serjeants’ Inn Chambers represented the Clinical Commissioning Group.

Please click here to read the above article from today’s Law Society Gazette.

Charles Foster represented Dr. Dhanuson Dharmasena in the first ever prosecution under the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003.

Dr. Dharmasena was a junior doctor who attended a Somali woman in labour. The woman had been infibulated as a child, and had subsequently been deinfibulated. The doctor made an incision through scar tissue in order to catheterise the urethra prior to effecting instrumental delivery. He then inserted a suture to stop bleeding from the wound. The prosecution said that this constituted FGM. The trial was contested for two and a half weeks before Sweeney J at Southwark Crown Court. The jury quickly acquitted.

Bridget Dolan represented the parents of Sally Mays at the inquest into her death in October 2015.

The Senior Coroner for Hull found that the decision by senior psychiatric nursing staff to refuse Sally a hospital bed when she was in obvious need of admission, was an “unconscionable and quixotic decision” following a “lamentable”, “perfunctory and slipshod assessment” of Sally.

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