ABSTRACT
Each road death is dealt with by the coroner system; the public office with responsibility for investigating, defining and processing every sudden death. This chapter considers procedures for managing road fatalities and argues that use of the term ‘accident’ in relation to road death may be inappropriate. There are some of the salient functions of the coroner’s role in sudden death, it discusses the process by which road fatalities come to be dealt with by these officials, beginning with a description of the scene of death. Whatever or whoever, in the case of death on the road, families may not accept the verdict of ‘accidental death’ as appropriate. The ritual of the public reconstruction of death takes place at the inquest. If the language used to explain road fatalities is the language of accident and blamelessness, then death on the road will continue to be constructed and defined as accidental, and hence as an essentially uncontrollable feature of modern living.
