A 15-year study of death in custody in Tuanku Ja'afar Hospital Seremban

Death-in-custody refers to the occurrence of death, while a person is under the custody of any enforcement agency. Their incidence often creates overwhelming public and media attention. Currently, there is no standardised definition of 'death-in-custody' in Malaysia and internationally. A crosssectional descriptive study was performed in the Department of Forensic Medicine Hospital Tuanku Ja'afar Seremban (HTJS) for a period of 24 months. Information on all custodial deaths registered at HTJS from January 2001 till December 2015 was selected from the in-house hospital death registration system. The definition of 'death-in-custody' used was guided by the recommendation by the 'Australian Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody' 1991 with few adjustments. Four custodial settings of interest (the police, prison, immigration depot for the illegal immigrant, and army custody) were studied. A total of 172 deaths-in-custody were collected, in which the majority of cases were natural deaths (84.88%), predominantly infective in nature (65.07%). Less than 1/6th of cases were unnatural deaths with more than 80% died from legal intervention. All custodial deaths were dominated by males (96.51%) with a mean and median age of 37 years. In terms of nationality, 52.91% of the deaths involved Malaysian citizens in which the 'Malay/Bumi' race outnumbered the other two main races. The most documented custodial deaths occurred in prison (44.19%) followed by immigration depots (38.37%) and police lock-ups (17.44%). This study provides a general overview of the pattern including the causes and the demographic profile involving death in custody in the Seremban district registered at HTJS.