If you watch, but not assist, in a suicide have you committed a crime in most states in the US?
IOW, is not ‘actively preventing’ someone from committing suicide usually considered a crime?
Nope. IANAL, but in order for neglect to be actionable in either a criminal or civil sense, you need to have acquired some sort of duty toward a person, generally by accepting responsibility for their care.
Need answer fast?
How would Joe Random Citizen be obligated to “actively” stop a suicide? Would he be expected to slap the pills/gun from the person’s hand? Leap up to cut the rope? Reach over the bridge guardrail, thus risking getting himself dragged over the side?
Though I suppose it’s worth it to keep trying to talk the person out of it until the very last moment (and at least try to be discreet while moving to place yourself outside any potential splatter zone), what more can be demanded of passerby?
I think the OP was imagining more a case where a friend tells you that they are going to commit suicide and you are present when they do so but don’t attempt to stop them or tell anyone.
Bingo. I’m wondering if you might get arrested if you just stand there and watch your friend blow their brains out without trying to stop them or at least calling the authorities. By doing nothing aren’t you aiding and abetting an illegal act?
No.
I saw my husband shoot himself in the head. I was in shock and it was so quick and I was holding my baby and I was more immediately instinctively worried about protecting myself and the kid, maybe?
The police took my statement and said that was fine, that I was probably alive because I didn’t try to stop him.
Well, an unstable person brandishing a firearm is one thing, so how about a different situation. Suppose a friend calls and tells you they are suicidal. You go over and watch them take a bottle of pills, and wait there with them until they die without ever calling for help or attempting to stop them. I’m pretty sure you’d be charged with something in many jurisdictions.
What makes you so sure? Have you ever heard of someone in such a situation being charged with something in any jurisdiction, let alone “many” jurisdictions? If so, what was/were the charge/s?
The danger is that if you did ANYTHING at all in the recent past that could in any way be considered “encouraging, assisting or aiding” then you could in theory be charged. This is a real issue in cases where a person has a terminal illness and wants to take their own life but already has limited mobility or impairment in some way.
If you drive them to the mall three weeks previous where they buy any items that they then use to commit suicide, you could in theory be charged. Or in the UK if you assist a friend or relative to travel to Switzerland knowing they intend to go to Dignatas, then you could be charged.
There’s been some controversy about this in the UK where relatives of terminally ill people have tried to get assurances they wouldn’t be prosecuted.
In Finland you could be charged with “Failure to Render Aid” (my translation, not sure what the actual legal term would be in English) under criminal law chapter 21 15§ and be fined or get up to 6 months in jail.
This gets into tricky territory. Now you’ve got a mentally unstable person with a stomach full of an unknown substance and lowered inhibitions who might try to hurt you if you reach for a phone. We’ve also got Dr Expert here that says by the time she passed out it was already to late to do anything anyways.
I’m not saying this is the case, but it could probably be argued that way.
The problem IMO, if you start assigning guilt to people who watch someone kill themself, what happens when a family member wants to sue the people who watched their son jump off a bridge? Or their depressed husband actually slip of the roof while he was cleaning the gutters? Or their daughter spiral out of control at work for the last 6 months even thought they DID try to help her but it wasn’t ‘taking’?
What about when you have some kid that kills himself at school and his classmates did everything they could to ‘talk him down’ and it just didn’t work. They had let the parents know weeks ahead of time that he was acting strange but they blew it off, they let the teachers know in the morning that something was wrong but they all passed the buck, then when he pulled a knife out in the bathroom they tried to talk to him but it all happened in a matter of minutes and now those parents are going to put those kids through a court case just because they happened to be the ones standing next to him when it happened?
I don’t know what the answer is, but it seems like slippery slope territory.
Committing suicide is not an illegal act. *Attempting *to commit suicide is, in some states, but it’s very rarely enforced. So as long as the person you’re watching doesn’t screw it up and live, you’re not aiding and abetting anything illegal. (Besides which, I’m pretty sure “aiding and abetting” have to be active, not passive, but I’m not entirely sure about that in a legal sense.)
Does not apply, of course, if you’re a mandated reporter (nurse, doctor, teacher, therapist, social worker) and suicidal thoughts or actions fall under mandated reporting in your state.
Have people in Finland actually been charged and convicted? The British article says no one has been prosecuted, hence the theoretical possibility as qualified by the poster. The OP was asking about the US, where I’d be surprised if there was a charge let alone conviction now days. They tried to charge Kevorkian, who was about as blatant with his facilitation as anyone can be, but nothing stuck until the video of him “pushing the button” was broadcast on national TV (with his blessing).
As far as the mandated reporter, do you know if failure to report rises to the level of a criminal charge? If so, where (and how) is the line drawn between what must and (literally due to HIPAA) must NOT be reported? And to whom does one report? I can’t imagine that every time some one responds with anything other than a negative to the screening questions about suicidal thoughts, the interviewer who does not “report” it is risking a criminal charge (notwithstanding the local law may differ widely from place to place).
I guess I should have specified that the Finnish law in question is about helping people in mortal danger, not about suicide in particular. I think this particular law is in practice mostly used when people leave their drunken friends outside in winter etc. It goes:
“Joka tietäen toisen olevan hengenvaarassa tai vakavassa terveyden vaarassa on tälle antamatta tai hankkimatta sellaista apua, jota hänen mahdollisuutensa ja tilanteen luonne huomioon ottaen kohtuudella voidaan häneltä edellyttää, on tuomittava pelastustoimen laiminlyönnistä sakkoon tai vankeuteen enintään kuudeksi kuukaudeksi.”
My poor, hasty translation:
“Who knows a person to be in deadly peril or in serious danger to their health and does not help them or get them such help that given his abilities and the situation could be expected of him, is to be convicted of failure to render aid to fines or jail for a maximum of six months.”
If you just watch somebody with belly full of pills to die, I’d say that fits the bill.
even without a “failure to render aid” law you could still be held accountable for the death of someone through inaction. To the extent that it was actionable on your part would be taken into consideration. Knocking pills out of someone’s hand is different than wrestling a gun away which involves risk. Calling emergency services would be a reasonable thing to expect from someone in the room.
There are cases where people knew about and helped purchase the necessary equipment for a humane exit and they were pursued by the law.
Conviction is certainly not guaranteed but the possibility of getting tied up in court is definitely a possibility. PBS did a program on just this subject and it’s been running recently in my area.
Meaningless distinction, since dead people can’t be punished.
Aiding suicide and doing it with publicity got Jack Kevorkian in a lot of trouble, but that’s a rather different case than simply monitoring someone euthanize his- or herself.
How is it meaningless, when the assertion was that sitting by and watching someone commit suicide is aiding and abetting a crime? Committing suicide isn’t a crime. Seems pretty meaningful to me.
It’s even less meaningless when you consider life insurance. The reason (or one of the reason) life insurance companies have sometimes been able to exclude death by suicide from their policies is that it used to be considered an illegal act, and they don’t have to pay if the death occurs while the insured is committing a crime. States have actively changed their laws to decriminalize suicide in response. This isn’t a semantic game, it’s a legal reality.
Then ASSISTING suicide wouldn’t be a crime, and it is. Just ask Dr. Kevorkian, who spent time in prison for it.
By your argument, that is, if your distinction was important, then watching someone (or helping someone) try to commit suicide but fail, woudl be punishable, but if they succeeded, it wouldn’t be. If there is such a jurisdiction, I’l be interested to learn about it, just for grins. (Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time that laws were idiotic.)
The insurance caveat has nothing to do with criminal statutes. They don’t want people to insure themselves and then kill themselves to benefit others. That would be the case even if suicide were legal.
Could they be fined $100 under Vermont’s Good Samaritan law?