Summary
A mum from Cheltenham has got the High Court’s verdict on her search for answers as to why her son died. In a British legal first today (July 16), the High Court of England and Wales ordered a fresh inquest into Jools Sweeney’s death, to allow previously omitted social media evidence to be examined.
Details
Ellen Roome MBE and Matt Sweeney , the parents of 14-year-old Jools, secured the ruling after a four-year campaign to find out what happened to their son in the hours before his death in April 2022. Jools’ family is deeply concerned about the part that social media played in his death, particularly because at this time a ‘blackout challenge’ was prevalent on social media.
Today’s ruling is believed to be the first of its kind in England and Wales, where one of the key grounds in overturning the previous inquest was the total absence of any social media evidence, which would have enabled the coroner to examine the role social media may have played in Jools’ death.
Sitting in the High Court, Lord Justice Warby and Mrs Justice Heather Williams KC quashed the findings of Jools’ original 2022 inquest, which lasted only 23 minutes, heard no oral evidence and proceeded without access to digital evidence that was unavailable at the time. A fresh inquest was ordered so that the full circumstances of his death can now be examined.
The application for a fresh inquest was granted by the Attorney General in March. The defendants in the case were the senior coroner for Gloucestershire and TikTok Information Technologies UK Limited, the UK subsidiary of TikTok. Neither party opposed the application.
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A private forensic analysis of Jools’ phone, commissioned by Ellen Roome, uncovered evidence which hadn’t been available to the original coronial investigation. She argues that, if it is confirmed Jools died from attempting a viral blackout challenge or something similar, it will show that content of this kind should never have been allowed onto social media platforms in the first place.
Today’s ruling will, for the first time, draw on powers under the Online Safety Act 2023 and the Data Use and Access Act 2025 to compel social media companies to disclose data relevant to a child’s death.
Ms Roome hopes it will also encourage the police to prioritise the collection and examination of every scrap of electronic data available at the outset of their investigation, so that nothing is intentionally or inadvertently deleted by the time the inquest occurs. For other bereaved parents, the ruling serves as a needed reminder that a coroner’s inquest is not necessarily the end of the road.
What You Need to Know
Today’s ruling will, for the first time, draw on powers under the Online Safety Act 2023 and the Data Use and Access Act 2025 to compel social media companies to disclose data relevant to a child’s death.
Report source: Punchline Gloucester
