I am unsure if suicide itself is illegal – and anyway, it is pretty tough to charge any one who was successful in the act. But, for example, most insurance claims are denied if it is determined that the deceased pulled the plug himself.
Anyway, I do know that most countries have laws that do outlaw assisting suicides (although Dr. K a.k.a., Dr. Death, has said (boasted, depending on your point of view) that no jury would ever convict him).
Well, in Japan a couple of weeks ago, a man killed 8 kids in an elementary school with a knife. Initial reports were that he had tried to ‘plan’ an insanity defense. It is now pretty clear that in fact his intention was to get the death penalty; he has said as much. Yesterday, he fired the two lawyers assigned to him when they indicated they would fight to avoid the death penalty.
So, we apparently have a guy unable to kill himself, and apparently is trying to get the state do to it for him. Now, the US and Japan both outlaw murder but have no problem with the death penalty. Is this another instance in which the government should have no qualms about assisting the criminal in his suicide wish?
Tangent question: isn’t someone who is willing to kill a bunch of innocent kids just to get the death penalty running a few bricks short of a full load? I mean, that sounds pretty insane to me…
Well he was taking ten times the amount of medicine he was supposed to be taking. So no, I don’t think he was thinking clearly at the time. Of course he might have not had the guts to kill himself and saw that as the only way out.
I quess the implecation is that if assisted suicide were available, this nimrod would not have stabbed children.
I dunno. If assisted suicide were available, he would still have to make a decision.
This assumes that the sole reason he stabbed a bunch of kids was because he wanted to die. I disagree wholeheartedly. The primary reason why he stabbed a bunch of kids was because he was a loony-tunes genuinely-certifiable nutcase, and no amount of available assisted-suicide would have changed that.
I am not a Psychiatrist, but… I think that while some people make a rational decision to die, most suicides aren’t rational. I know of a case where a pharmacist committed suicide–by jumping. We can’t ask him why, but I think he must have had the method as part of the idea. In other words, he didn’t think, “my life is intolerable, so what’s the best way to end it?” He thought of ending it and somehow the idea of jumping was part of that thought, not a separate conclusion. I also recall a friend who, in a time of great stress in his life, wanted to end things, but he didn’t want to leave a mess in the bathtub. In his mind, cutting his wrists was the way he was going to go, and he saw no way around leaving a mess. So he didn’t do it, and later got some help. He told me later that if he’d been rationally thinking of good methods, he’d have come up with a dozen that would have been immediately available and wouldn’t have left a mess, but somehow the idea of wrist slashing was an inseparable part of the idea of killing himself.
