The jury at the new inquests into the Hillsborough disaster is to deliver its verdict on Tuesday on how 96 people died at an FA Cup semi-final on 15 April 1989.
The jury of six women and three men will give their decisions from 11am, on what is expected to be a highly charged day for relatives of the 96, many of whom will be at court for the conclusion of the longest jury proceedings in British legal history.
The coroner, Sir John Goldring, told the jury on Monday that he would accept a majority decision of 8-1 or 7-2 on the one remaining question they had not agreed on: whether the 96 people who died were unlawfully killed by gross negligence manslaughter.
The jurors continued their deliberations before they returned and indicated that at least seven of them had reached a majority decision on that question.
The decisions will be given from 11am on Tuesday. Addressing the jury, Goldring said: “It is so that those families who could not be here all the time can come. So it will be tomorrow that I will ask you formally to return your findings in relation to the general and individual questionnaires.”
The jury has been told to answer a general questionnaire of 14 questions as well as record the time and cause of death for each of the Liverpool fans who died.
The jury forewoman had told the coroner last week that they had reached unanimous decisions on 13 of the questions they had to answer about how the 96 people died.
Goldring had directed the jury in his summing up that to find that the 96 people were unlawfully killed, they must be satisfied that the South Yorkshire police chief superintendent in command at the match, David Duckenfield, “was responsible for manslaughter by gross negligence of those 96 people”.
For gross negligence to be proved, Goldring said the jury must be sure Duckenfield breached his duty of care to the people attending the semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, and that his breach “was so bad, having regard to the risk of death involved, as in your view to amount to a criminal act or omission”.
The other questions ask if there were failures which caused or contributed to the deaths by South Yorkshire police officers in the planning and handling of the match; by the police and South Yorkshire metropolitan ambulance service in their response to the lethal crush; by Sheffield Wednesday, whose home ground is Hillsborough, and the club’s engineers, Eastwood and partners, in ensuring the safety of the stadium, and by Sheffield city council and other authorities responsible for certifying that the ground met safety requirements.
The jury also has a question which Goldring has told them is “controversial”, about whether the behaviour of Liverpool supporters at the approach to the Leppings Lane turnstiles may have caused or contributed to the dangerous situation which developed there.
For that question, he has told the jury they must consider whether the supporters were “unusually forceful or resistant to police control”, whether significant numbers did not have tickets, their arrival pattern and behaviour. The jury heard in evidence that after congestion developed outside the turnstiles, Duckenfield ordered a large exit gate open to allow 2,000 people access to the ground quickly. He did not order the closure of a tunnel leading to the central “pens” of the terrace, where the crush then happened, leading to the 96 deaths. The 14 questions include a specific one about whether errors were made when the exit gate was opened, which requires the jury to consider if supporters should have been directed away from the tunnel.
The jury was finally sent out on 6 April, more than two years after the inquests started on 1 April 2014, amounting to by far the longest case heard by a jury in British legal history.
New inquests were ordered after three judges in the high court in December 2012 quashed the first inquest, heard between November 1990 and March 1991.
The dead victims of the disaster were aged 10 to 67, and included 37 teenagers and 26 parents. A total of 58 people lost a parent at Hillsborough, the inquests have been told in personal statements by the bereaved families.
Many of those whose relatives died have regularly attended the new inquests in the courtroom in an office block in the Birchwood business park, Warrington, including some who have attended almost every day.
