Lifeguard fails to overturn conviction after pool death

A LIFEGUARD who chatted to girls while a swimmer drowned in a Walsall swimming pool failed in an appeal against his conviction before the country's top judge.

Father-of-three Adrian Miles, aged 48, was using the pool at the Walsall campus of Wolverhampton University to recover from a rugby injury when he drowned, in July 2006.

Last October, 28-year-old lifeguard Alex Stephen Cotterill, of Leighton Road, Wolverhampton, was fined £200 after a jury found him guilty of breaching the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974.

Following an application to appeal, his case was back in court again on Tuesday, March 2, when the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, rejected all arguments attacking the jury's guilty verdict.

Lord Judge said there was "no reason whatsoever" to doubt the safety of Cotterill's conviction and refused to allow his lawyers to argue their case any further.

At his trial, the jury found that Cotterill had failed in his duty by not staying at the deep end of the pool where he was stationed, and instead going to the shallow end to talk to girls.

He was away from his station talking to the girls and a colleague for 25 minutes and, during that time, Mr Miles got into difficulty and drowned.

The lifeguard's lawyers argued that the trial judge had been wrong to tell the jury that any "systemic" health and safety failures by the university would not exonerate Cotterill of his duty.

Experts called by the prosecution had given evidence about a lax health and safety culture at the pool, and the jury had been told of hap-hazard training given to staff.

The judge should have told the jury this was relevant, since studies showed that lax standards in employers make it more likely that their workers will lapse, the court was told.

Lord Judge said the university's "failings" may have been "extremely significant" if other breaches had been alleged, but had nothing to do with whether Cotterill was doing his job properly.

He added: "Provided the jury were satisfied that he was involved in the conversations, he was plainly not exercising his responsibilities at all; he was ignoring them.

"He knew perfectly well what he should have been doing and that he should not be involved in the conversations. The actions which the jury found established, namely that he was involved in the conversations, had absolutely nothing to do with the failures for which the university was responsible."