I’m starting to wonder whether Parliament should consider a new offence of accessing and/or retaining records of the deceased without lawful excuse.
The BBC, and others, are reporting concerns that there may have been unauthorised access to medical records of the victim of killer Valdo Calocane. In the last few years we have also seen similar stories emerging in relation to police files on the murders of Sarah Everard, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman (and I am sure there are many others).
The offence at section 170 of the Data Protection Act 2018 cannot be engaged when the records in question relate to someone who is dead, and although there is the potential for prosecutions for misconduct in a public office, or under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, there will be times when these do not apply.
Such unwarranted access seems to be a serious risk which arises wherever there is a high profile killing, and it must cause immense extra distress for the families and friends of the victims.
I wonder if now is the time for a debate on the topic, with an agenda item of whether there is need for a new criminal offence.
The views in this post (and indeed most posts on this blog) are my personal ones, and do not represent the views of any organisation I am involved with.
informationrightsandwrongs 
I agree with you. This was always such a grey area and I used to work in a hospice setting where (obviously not killings) but complicated cases over deceased records used to arise a lot, and the law was never clear. There is potential for a lot of hurt in some of these cases.