Brian Hutton, Baron Hutton

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James Brian Edward Hutton, Baron Hutton, PC (29 June 1932 – 14 July 2020) was a leading British judge. He served as Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland from 1989 to 1997, and then as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary (a Law Lord) from 1997 to 2004, later becoming Baron Hutton, of Bresagh in the County of Down.

Born in Belfast, he was the son of a railways executive. He won a scholarship to Shrewsbury School and studied jurisprudence at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1953. He studied at Queen’s University Belfast and was called to the Bar of Northern Ireland in 1954. He became a Queen’s Counsel in 1970 and served as a High Court judge from 1979 to 1989.

As Lord Chief Justice, he also joined the Privy Council. In 1997 he moved to England to become a Law Lord, receiving a life peerage.

Key moments in his career include:
- In 1994, he dismissed the appeal of Private Lee Clegg in a high-profile murder case.
- He led the Bloody Sunday inquest and publicly challenged some comments by the coroner, later upholding the findings of the Widgery Tribunal.
- In 1999 he was involved in the Pinochet extradition case in London; the initial ruling to extradite was later overturned by a larger panel of Law Lords because of concerns about a judge’s links to Amnesty International.
- In 1978 he defended the United Kingdom at the European Court of Human Rights in Ireland v United Kingdom, where the court ruled that some Northern Ireland interrogation techniques were inhuman and degrading but not torture.
- From 2003 to 2004 he chaired the inquiry into the death of weapons expert David Kelly; the report in January 2004 largely cleared the government while criticizing parts of the BBC.

He retired as a Law Lord in January 2004 but remained in the House of Lords until April 2018. He died on 14 July 2020, aged 88.

Personal life: He was married first to Mary Murland (1975–2000) and then to Lindy Nickols (from 2001). He had five children in total, including three stepchildren.