Our selection process

The remember section of the website features 40 people who have died in state-related deaths since INQUEST was founded.

This selection of 40 people is a tiny sample of INQUEST's casework over a period of 40 years (1981-2021) and an even smaller sample of all the people who have died at the hands of the state. There are over 10,000 cases on the organisational database, which includes a spectrum of INQUEST's casework, from monitoring deaths in custody to providing in-depth and long-standing support to individual families.   

The 40 people were carefully selected by an ethics steering group that was attached to the original Unlocking the Truth heritage project. The group was composed of bereaved families, INQUEST staff, lawyers, academics and board members, many of whom have been involved with the charity for decades. 

The 40 people represent a spread in terms of chronology, location, setting in which death occurred (e.g., prison, police, mental health), gender, race, social class, age, sexuality, religion, inquest outcome and campaign approaches.

INQUEST have also worked on mass fatalities such as Marchioness Disaster (1989), Hillsborough Football Disaster (1989) and Grenfell Tower Fire (2017). None of the people who tragically died in these disasters are featured in the remember section because INQUEST did not provide individual casework support.

Visitors can access most of these casefolders in our archive which is held at Bishopsgate Institute. Most of the 40 people represented on this website have a phsyical casefolder, however cases post-2010 mainly exist in digital format only and are not yet part of the public archive. 

In September 2025, INQUEST transferred all of its pre-1991 casefolders to its archive at Bishopsgate Institute. None of the these cases are included on INQUEST's database, which was part of the motivation to ensure safe storage. Casefolders at Bishopsgate Institute have different access levels: closed, apply to archivist and open. If you want to access apply to archivist material, you will need to contact Bishopsgate Institute to request access: library@bishopsgate.org.uk. 

If you are a family member, friend or interested party and beleive that INQUEST has materials relating to your loved one that you would like to access, then please get in touch at inquest@inquest.org.uk.