The 136 coroners in England and Wales have not always enjoyed the best press.

Although last year alone they dealt with more than 23,000 cases, the public tends to remember the Hillsborough disaster -- the longest, and arguably most inappropriate, in legal history -- and the Marchionness riverboat tragedy, recently reopened for a 'new examination'.To add to this, the profession -- dating back as it does more than 1,000 years -- often suffers from an outdated and archaic public image, something it is keen to dispel.

With the introduction to UK courts last month of US-style animated accident reconstructions, (see [2000] Gazette, 5 October, 24], the profession is doing its best to move with the times.The main function of the 21st Century coroner is to determine certain facts about a death -- most importantly the cause, be it violent, unusual or just initially unclear.

To this end, most of the coroners in England and Wales are lawyers, although 25% are medical doctors, albeit with a legal qualification.

Not all deaths are reported to the coroner: one is informed usually when no doctor has attended the deceased, when the death was unexpected or sudden, when the cause is unknown, or when the death occurs in police custody.Deaths in police custody are by their nature controversial, and as such are one of the few areas where coroners must sit with a jury (the other cases are deaths resulting from the actions of a police officer and deaths in prison).

However, Debra Coles, co-director of Inquest -- a pressure group formed to campaign about deaths in custody and advise on the inquest procedure -- says this is not enough.

'Every family has the right to be legally represented at inquests, and we have been campaigning for many years now for legal aid to be granted to families for inquests.'Sadiq Khan, partner at the London-based human rights firm Christian Fisher, regularly appears for bereaved families in inquests.

'All the inquest work we do is pro bono, there's no money in it.

We do it because without our advice families would have no representation in court.

It's incredibly unfair because often everyone else appearing in the court [such as police officers or representatives of hospital trusts] has publicly-funded legal advice.'The government has introduced a 'legal help scheme' -- previously known as the 'green form' scheme -- giving families a degree of legal support during inquests.

'If you are earning less than £80 a week, you're eligible for legal advice and assistance,' explains Mr Khan.

However, the scheme leaves a lot to be desired, as it does not cover representation at the actual inquest, merely advice in drafting letters to the coroner before an d after the inquest.

'It's also not a commercially viable scheme,' Mr Khan says.

'It only pays solicitors £50 an hour, which is nothing for a firm like us based in Bloomsbury.'Harriet Wistrich is a solicitor at Thanki Novy Taube, another London-based firm which carries out inquest work.

She agrees that the legal help scheme is far from ideal.

'To be eligible for advice, you have to be on the lowest income band possible, lower even than for normal legal aid.' She avoids the 'awful' situation of asking bereaved relatives for fees by 'simply asking for a nominal payment for basic expenses'.However, since April, the Lord Chancellor's Department has recognised that certain controversial deaths should be eligible for 'exceptional legal aid'.

Exceptional legal aid is available at the Lord Chancellor's discretion, when he sees that case as being in the 'wider public interest' or of 'overwhelming public importance for the client'.An example of an inquest falling in the 'wider public interest' category is that into the death of Christopher Alder, a black detainee who died in police custody in April 1998.

The trial was deemed eligible because of its sheer size -- more than 100 witnesses were called, and video evidence from the custody suite was viewed -- and its potentially controversial nature.Ms Wistrich sees inquests such as this as being few and far between.

'Exceptional legal aid is only granted in the most controversial cases -- only a few have been funded since April, as the Lord Chancellor himself has to consider every one.'But there are those who do not see legal aid as necessarily the best solution for all cases.

One coroner, who wished to remain anonymous, said: 'In reality, the process of applying for legal aid would mean that there would be greater delays to the inquest procedure than there are already.

Delaying inquests for months, even years, won't help relatives' grieving process.'Christopher Dorries is a solicitor, a full-time coroner and author of the recently published 'Coroners Courts -- a guide to law and practice'.

Despite maintaining that legal aid should be granted for inquests, he does not necessarily agree that families without it are at an unfair disadvantage.

'You must bear in mind that the coroner's court is not adversarial in nature: it's merely inquisitorial.

It's the coroner's sole responsibility to ensure that the right questions are asked, and so the unrepresented families aren't at as great a disadvantage as they would be in other courts.'This inquisitorial nature of the court, although arguably beneficial for unrepresented families, is another cause of great controversy in its own right.

'Coroners' courts are one of the most antiquated, outdated and old-fashioned courts in the land,' says Mr Khan.

'The coroner is the court and the inquisitor -- there are no sides represented and only the coroner gets to decide which questions are asked.''Interested parties' are allowed to ask the witnesses questions, but Mr Khan says: 'The coroner gets to decide who is an 'interested person' [usually relatives or close friends], and even then the coroner restricts the questions asked to the very basic who, how, where, what.'Ms Wistrich agrees that the inquisitorial system is a 'very strange' one.

'If a line of questioning of a witness is going in a certain direction -- for example, trying to establish responsibility for a death -- the coroner frequently jumps in to stop it.

That is why legal representation for families is so important -- they need someone to argue their point and press the issue.'But Mr Dorries vehemently rejects the suggestion that the inquisitorial system is outdated and irrelevant.

'We are not like other courts because our purpose is completely different.

We are designed to be the first line of enquiry, to find out for relatives what actually happened to their loved ones -- we're not meant to apportion blame and have different sides.

We find out facts.'One famous example of the coroners' system coming in for a great deal of criticism was in the aftermath of the Hillsborough football stadium tragedy in 1989, where the deaths of 95 football fans [a 96th fan died later] were dealt with at an inquest which many considered to be a scandalously inappropriate vehicle.

The government listened to the complaints, and legislation was passed (in the 1998 Access to Justice Act) meaning that whenever a public inquiry and a coroner's inquest collided, the inquiry would 'absorb' the inquest, which would close with limited evidence.'Duplication serves no purpose,' says Mr Dorries, 'and with this legislation, it is to be hoped that the Hillsborough situation will never happen again.' With this landmark proviso, and the establishment of a system --however imperfect -- for exceptional legal aid, he sees the current climate for coroners as a positive one.'This is probably the most significant and exciting period in the profession for hundreds of years.

But even without these new changes, the system is an excellent one, and it's a shame that other countries in Europe don't have a similar set-up.'