UK: Damages over van death
01 May 1995
Police admitted liability in March for the death in 1990 of a mentally ill black man killed by a neckhold in a police van. Oliver Pryce, a 30-year-old man suffering a mental breakdown, threw himself across the bonnet of a slow-moving ambulance. Police called to the scene grabbed him in a necklock and bundled him face down into the van, where he died of asphyxia. In 1991, an inquest jury brought in a verdict of unlawful killing, but no police officer was ever charged or disciplined, and although "substantial" damages were paid to his family, there was no apology for killing him.