I don’t know if it is still the case here in the UK but I know at one time if two people entered into a " suicide pact" and one of them survived then that person would be charged with the other person’s murder.
A search of New York Consolidated Laws turned up several ordinances prohibiting the assistance or promotion of a suicide, but no law actually prohibiting the suicide itself.
Zev Steinhardt
Choosybeggar, et al., I beleive the maximum length of an involuntary hold for someone in California is 48 hours (as opposed to the NY 60 days). I reckon in cheery CA, people snap out of their depressions faster?
Seems to me the legal principle is that of the state protecting its members, even against themselves where grave danger is concerned. Also, there is the idea that a suicide can cause physical and/or emotional damage to those near to them; the state needs to protect those people as well.
The idea that a suicide is inherently evil (A “felo-da-se”, “evildoer-upon-himself”?) seems to have fallen out of the legal thoughts; today it’s more like a suicide is ill and needs immediate protection from the danger they pose to themselves and then treatment.
Common sense would say that to prosecute a dead person is a waste of time, but I suppose in the old days one could have gone after their estate. This is basically spiteful and accomplishes little that I can see, but it isn’t conceptually too far removed from the Roman Catholic attitude toward suicides and providing spiritual services for their souls as well as those of the bereaved.
Per Schnitte’s post, in practice the RC Church doesn’t seem to see the idea of suicide as the result of a (mental) illness, instead of suicide as the result of the devil, sin, etc. However… a post a while back did cite the Catholic Encyclopedia as saying the RC church at least legally does understand and accept suicide as the result of mental illness or unendurable suffering from various diseases.
Making suicide illegal was not as crazy as it sounds.
Long ago, when the world was young, I studied law and the matter was explained as follows. No one was charged with the crime of suicide. If they survived, they received proper help and treatment.
However, it is illegal to assist or conspire to achieve a criminal act. So, if suicide was illegal, assisting a suicide was illegal. This enabled the law to clamp down on the Kevorkians of this world - preventing them from assisting people to commit suicide. This was seen as a good thing - which is a subject for a different thread.
Here in Ireland, suicide ceased to be a crime in 1993. However the Criminal Law (Suicide) Act of 1993 made it a crime to assist a suicide. This achieved the same effect, without criminalising suicide.
While sucide isn’t illegal or isn’t enforcable if it is, one thing that does come up that if you kill yourself, insurance companies will not pay your relatives any life insurance you have paid for.
Unless it doesn’t look like a suicide.
Suicide was traditionally viewed as a crime in England. It is said that at one time people who attempted suicide and failed were executed.
Since colonial times, suicide has not been viewed as a crime in America.
While it is not “criminal”, suicide is illegal in the sense that it is against public policy and there are laws to discourage it and to empower the state to intervene when it is attempted.
The closest thing to an instance where a suicide attempt is treated as a crime is where two people make a suicide pact and one chickens at the last minute and doesn’t jump, changes his mind after taking poison and calls a doctor, etc. There have been rare instances where the survivor has been prosecuted for murder.
There are also jurisdictions where people have been prosecuted or sued causing suicide.
An actual case: a prostitute climbed out on a ledge after a beating and told her pimp she would jump. He replied with something witty such as: “you’d better” and indicated he intended to go back to beating her if she climbed back in through the window. He was prosecuted for her murder.
There are also numerous cases in which a policeman or fireman went into a severe depression after sustaining injuries on the job and eventually killed themselves. There have been successful lawsuits against people who brought on the injuries for having “caused suicide”.
The absolute rule that insurance companies do not pay off in cases of suicide is an example of “movie law”; in the movies they can’t and won’t. In real life it depends on the jurisdiction.
In Missouri, for instance, an insurance company cannot exclude suicide coverage from a life insurance policy. Rather, to avoid liability, the company must show that the policy was purchased “in contemplation of suicide”; that is, they were considering taking their life already when they got the insurance, and so were defrauding the company.