A catalogue of grave blunders by staff at a privately run prison led to the preventable suicide of a young inmate, a court was told yesterday.

The failings of three officers at HMP Rye Hill, Warwickshire, are said to have amounted to such a “fundamental breach of duty” that they are standing trial accused of manslaughter through gross negligence.

Never before has a British prison officer faced such a charge over the self-inflicted death of a prisoner. The case concerns the suicide of 23-year-old Michael Bailey, who was found hanging by his shoelace from the door of his cell in the jail’s segregation unit in March 2005.

A jury at Northampton Crown Court was told that Bailey had been placed on suicide watch six days before his death after a disturbing deterioration in his mental condition. Rachel Brand, QC, for the prosecution, outlined a series of errors that were subsequently made, individually or collectively, by staff at the prison.

She said that although Bailey was threatening openly to take his own life, officers at the jail, which is run, under contract to the Home Office, by a company called Global Solutions Ltd, did not remove his shoelaces and also failed to discover the potential ligature point in a metal panel attached to the door frame.

Regulations demanded that any prisoner on suicide watch should be observed in his cell six times every hour, yet not a single check had been made on Bailey for at least an hour, and possibly even longer, before his body had been discovered. It is alleged that false entries were later made to the prison’s suicide-watch book in an attempt to cover up the truth.

“The Crown’s case is that these three defendants . . . had a duty to safeguard the prisoners in their care, including Michael Bailey,” Miss Brand said. “Their duty extended to safeguarding Michael Bailey from causing harm to himself, particularly in the light of their knowledge of his precarious mental state in the days before his death.”

Had the prison officers carried out their duties properly, Bailey “would not have been in a position to take his own life. If a man who is mentally disturbed and suicidal is in his cell, which has a ligature point, and has his shoelaces, you do not need hindsight to know what could happen.

“To cap it all, if he is not observed for an hour when he should be observed six times every hour, it all adds up to a very grave breach of duty indeed. That suicide could have been and should have been prevented.”

The court was told that Bailey, from Birmingham, was serving a four-year sentence for cocaine offences.

His mother had become concerned about his behaviour after a telephone call in which her son had been uncharacteristically emotional, weeping and shouting. A “rapid and drastic” deterioration followed and he was placed on suicide watch.

Two days before his death, Miss Brand said, he was visited by his mother, his girlfriend and his brother, who were shocked to find ligature marks on his neck. He told them he had tried to hang himself but the ligature had broken. Bailey’s mother had been so worried that she had made a series of telephone calls in a desperate attempt to alert senior staff at the jail.

Miss Brand told the court that on the day of Bailey’s death, three prison custody officers were on duty in the segregation unit. One had been in the job only “for a matter of weeks”, while another had never before worked a full shift in the unit. The third, 23-year-old Daniel Daymond, was the most experienced. The Crown says he “must have known” that no checks were being carried out on Bailey between 11am and noon, when he was found hanging.

Paul Smith, 39, the unit’s manager, is said to have “completely failed to organise his staff”, while Samantha Prime, the 29-year-old manager of another unit at Rye Hill, is accused of failing to take any action when Bailey’s mother told her of his suicide attempt.

Mr Smith, from Warrington, Mr Daymond and Ms Prime, both from Rugby, each deny manslaughter by gross negligence. Mr Daymond and a fourth Rye Hill officer, Ben King, 21, deny a charge linked to their alleged attempt to pervert the course of justice by falsifying entries in the suicide-watch book. The trial continues.

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