REPORT OF AN INDEPENDENT INQUIRY ... - Hundred Families

8. Dr Röhricht explained that he saw his primary rôle as being to provide an expert opinion for the
Court as to Chandran’s mental health at the time he saw him. The only information he had when
he prepared his report was that contained in Chandran’s outpatient file and that which Chandran
himself gave him. He explained that the only reason for his seeing Chandran was because the
Probation Service was aware that Chandran had a past history of mental illness “and wanted to
exclude that the offence was driven by mental health features”. Nonetheless, at the end of his
interview with Chandran, he offered to put him in contact with mental health services with a view
to monitoring his mental state but Chandran declined this. Dr Röhricht did not himself refer
Chandran to the CMHT. Dr Röhricht told the Inquiry Panel that Chandran did not present any
delusions of a persecutory nature, did not talk about voice hearing experiences of a command
nature, took full responsibility for what he had done and seemed to have been stable for long
periods of time without any intervention and without any maintenance therapy.
9. In his report dated 11th June 2001, he summarised his opinion as follows:
“In summary I can say that I could not elicit any symptoms/evidence of a current mental
disorder. Mr Sukumaran is quite capable of giving a coherent account of himself and his
personal view on the index offences was that it very much a resulted (sic) from provocative
behaviour of the other employee.
“Nevertheless there is sufficient evidence that Mr Sukumaran suffered in the past from
Affective Disorder with hypomanic or manic episodes and it is difficult to retrospectively
establish if this condition might have caused him to react inappropriately in response to the
argument with his colleague. He was certainly going through a distressing time, due to the
fact that his father was seriously ill.”
10. Dr Röhricht said he had no supplementary background about Chandran to assist him with
assessing his past dangerousness other than that contained in his outpatient records which, in his
opinion, did not disclose anything significant. He was aware that Chandran had damaged his
father’s flat before his admission to Goodmayes Hospital (which had, of course, been more than
ten years earlier) but concluded that alone did not weigh heavily in the balance given Chandran
expressed very real concern about his father’s illness at the time of the offence and that he
appeared to have been stable for long periods of time.
11. The Inquiry Panel heard that, in making this referral, the Probation Service thought they were
referring Chandran back into catchment psychiatric services and that they were triggering a
forensic psychiatric assessment with fuller information-gathering as part of that assessment. We
do not think Dr Röhricht considered he was providing a forensic report (indeed, he is a general,
not forensic, psychiatrist).
12. There is clearly a discrepancy between the two as to their expectation of the nature of a
psychiatrist’s input in preparing reports for sentencing purposes. Caroline Godleman told the
Inquiry Panel that she thought the links between the Trust and the Probation Service needed to
be improved. It was her hope that a request for a psychiatric report to assist the Court would
trigger consideration of the case by the CMHT but that was not the practice in 2001. We were
not reassured that it would happen now either.
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