A SOLICITOR wrote to the prison authorities expressing extreme concerns about the mental well being of her client weeks before he was found hanged in his cell, an inquest was told yesterday.

Penny Muir said she urged the governor at Wandsworth Prison in London to take Paul Day out of a segregation unit and place him in a hospital wing, after he had attempted suicide three times.

But she discovered that, on the day she had written the letter in August 2002, Day had been transferred to the high security Frankland Prison, in Durham, where he was immediately placed in segregation.

Day, 31, of Essex, who was identified within minutes of his arrival at Frankland as a police informer, was found dead in his cell in October 2002.

Ms Muir, giving evidence at an inquest hearing in Chester-le-Street Magistrates' Court, said she had represented Day when he was accused of robbery - for which he was convicted and sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison.

She kept in touch with him following frequent transfers to several institutions and visited him in Wandsworth.

Ms Muir said: "I was extremely concerned about my client and the condition in which he was being kept. It was completely unsuited for someone in his state of mind to be in.

"He should have been placed in a more therapeutic environment."

Speaking of Day's death, she said: "The whole thing was cumulative. He was really beginning to despair because there was no progress at all.

"He was being moved from pillar to post and from segregation unit to segregation unit.

"Most people had no knowledge of him or did not want to know. Given his mental state of health, no one in that situation should be treated that way - whether a prisoner or not."

The hearing continues.