The jury of the coroner’s inquest into the deaths of four-year-old Nash Campbell and his mother Patricia Hennessey in June 2013 has provided recommendations that will help strengthen our justice system, Premier and Attorney General Wade MacLauchlan says.
“This spring, a jury of Islanders sat through an emotional inquest, and we thank them for their difficult work,” MacLauchlan said. “Our government has received the jury’s recommendations and will be taking immediate action to prevent similar tragedies from ever happening again.”
The jury’s 15 recommendations focus on the need for better information sharing among government departments and agencies that work with high-risk families.
“This coming Sunday marks the two-year anniversary of these tragic deaths,” the premier said, “and our thoughts are with the families and friends of Nash and Patricia.”
More information regarding the case will be available by the end of the day at www.gov.pe.ca/jps/coroner.
Backgrounder
Recommendations of the Campbell-Hennessey inquest jury
1. Health care workers should be provided additional education in recognizing risks for filicide and strategies for prevention
2. Child protection policy and protocol [procedure] regarding the identification and management of high risk cases needs to be updated.
3. There needs more training for Child Protective Services [CPS] workers on parental engagement
4. There needs to be mandatory multidisciplinary training on domestic violence and child abuse.
5. There should be better information sharing between families and the justice system.
6. There needs to be judicial education on domestic violence and child abuse.
7. There needs to be timelier access to child custody assessments in high risk family court cases.
8. Develop supervised access services
9. There needs to be a strategy in place to assure that employees who are dealing with domestic violence or mental health issues receive workplace support.
10. There needs to be a policy requiring a “cooling off period” before the spouse who has been assigned limited visitation rights resumes caring for the child.
11. There needs to be more aggressive enforcement of custody arrangements, with justice system consequences, such as criminal charges, available if the terms of child custody are violated.
12. Parents in child custody cases should be required to attend violence prevention and successful parenting programs. Failure to do so might result in visitation rights being revoked.
13. Every high risk family should have a ‘Safety Circle’.
14. Every family with child custody issues should have a “Peace Plan.
15. Government should consider creating a provincial position for “Child Advocate”.