When I was a law student, they explained to me why suicide was made a crime, and it’s not so stupid than it appears. It was to stop people assisting suicides.
If it is a crime to do something, then it is a crime to conspire with someone else to do it. If you assisted someone to commit suicide, you were conspiring to commit a crime. And that meant you could be prosecuted for assisting a suicide.
If commiting suicide was not a crime, then it was difficult to prosecute people who had assisted it There was no clear crime that they had committed.
(Of course, there is a wider discussion for society, whether we should have a right to assist others to commit suicide. I would support the right to suicide in certain situations, and therefore the right to assist. However, there are very large issues about regulating that, to prevent murders being concealed as assisted suicide.)
In here there’s a report of a case Regina v. The Coroner of Leeds (November 12, 26, 1849) which is prefaced by the following legal requirement regarding inquisitions.
An inquisition in which a verdict is returned of felo de se must be on parchment, and should contain allegations of “striking”, that the death happened within a year and a day, and that there was a “mortal” wound.
The case in question is that of Sarah Ann Whalley (bottom right hand corner).
The court quashed the inquisition based on the objections raised as above. I’m curious to know the significance of parchment in this context, and to learn why a verdict should have been thrown out because the wrong paper was used (among other reasons).
The report quotes a UK Act of 1843 (that’s the 6 &7 Vict c.83 reference). I assume the Act has been repealed, as I can’t find it on the usual sites for UK Law.
The application involved certiorari, which implies that it was challenging whether due process had been followed in legal proceedings. There appears to have been an inquest into the death of the lady, and the decision seems to have been that it was indeed suicide - or felo-de-se.
I suspect it was being challenged on the basis that the proper formalities had not been complied with in reaching that decision. That included somthing including something wrong with the documentation, which was required to be on parchment. However, it may be that parchment had some other meaning at the time - that is, it was the name of some document or format of document used.
The court seems to have agreed, but it is not clear what the final outcome was.
If the law once specified that the verdict had to be recorded in Anglo-Saxon runes then until somebody got round to changing it, in Anglo-Saxon runes it would have to be. I am guessing that the law against suicide was probably ecclesiastical, as a crime against God (not much civil or criminal law could do about it!) heinous enough to record on longer-lasting parchment for all time where what paper there was might be re-pulped into new paper after a few years. Again, it could be that parchment was the normal (but expensive) medium of record at the time which would not be wasted on detailing minor offences and ‘committed to parchment’ only meant that it was worth archiving at all.
As with any legal case, there might have been resistance, say from the family, for having the death declared a “felo-de-se”, and so objecting on valid legal formalities grants the outcome they desire when the coroner/court was otherwise predisposed to declare it so.
I was unclear in what I said about the outcome. While the court seems to have quashed the decision of the inquest, it is not clear whether the inquest was started again and made another decision later.
On the face of it, there was a violent death, which had to be investigated. It seems unlikely that they simply said, “You made a mess of the previous hearing, so let’s ignore that death.” However, they were more fixated on procedure at the expense of truth in those days, so it is possible that that was the actual outcome, even if it seems unlikely.
There would have been a preference for recording a death as something other than suicide, because of the social and criminal consequences. I remember a time when few deaths were publicly acknowledged as suicides. People shot themselves by accident while cleaning gun barrels with their lips, or mistakenly took too much medication, or carelessly fell off bridges etc.
I think we do it better today, when we acknowledge suicides, and try to analyse why they happened. It stops a lot of silly pretence, and false data about the causes of death.
However, Irish newspapers still use the coded phrase, “Foul play is not suspected” when they want to report that it was a suicide. Is that (or some similar phrase) normal elsewhere?
Well, yes. What is shown is one particular inquiry and the results of that inquiry. Any further inquiries would be separate records.
It seems to me the violent death was determined by the coroner to be self-inflicted, and that the only question is whether it is deemed a “felo-de-se”, which has certain consequences, or if it is ruled a mere suicide, which suggests the victim was mentally unstable.
If one wishes to speculate, one has to wonder why the Coroner would so botch up a ruling. He should have been familiar with the requirements for a valid ruling. While they seem a bit odd (the specificity of requiring the allegation of “striking” is one obvious point), they are not unduly burdensome. On the other hand, he appears to have been the one directing the jury to find it a felo-de-se, so it is hard to assert that he really did not wish to make it stick, but was compelled by his job to do what the evidence stated, so he botched the formalities to give grounds for refutation.
At least before 1724 there was no insanity defense in Britain at all. In fact there was no distinction between insanity and criminality. A distraught Briton, or more pointedly, the heirs(!), had to hide or disguise acts of suicide for any chance at inheritance. In principle, one’s life belonged to God and crown, not to oneself, so there was little distinction between murder and “self-murder.” Suicide was only distinctive as a technique.
There seems to me some time distinctions between suicide and Felo-de-se. Considering the lack of antibiotics, a minor wound could easily result in deadly infection or blood poisoning. So perhaps a failed suicide attempt, where the resulting wound caused death long after the original act may have been called felo-de-se???
Life was a lot more brutal back then. I think its hard to appreciate such issues in the 21st century.