“Self defense” does not automatically mean you’re allowed to shoot people. What it means is that you can use sufficient force to end the threat, but not beyond that.
If, hypothetically, Evil Girlfriend was trying to physically force him into the truck then using physical force to defend himself would be justified.
Not sure if just verbal threats were involved that physical force could be justified as self defense or seen as escalation.
In any case - we’re talking about a mentally ill, highly suggestible young man and a young women unrelenting in her verbal harassment and abuse. I think there’s a legitimate argument that she contributed to his death by her verbal actions, especially since at one point he exited the truck of his own accord after which she used her words to persuade him to get back into the truck. If she had not done that he might still be alive.
Let me ask this: are there not other situations where telling someone to do something that could get them killed would get you in legal trouble? The court seems to be arguing this isn’t just speech, but negligence. So that seems to be the direction they are going down.
Other angles I thought of were conspiracy to commit suicide and the death threat angle–arguing that telling a suicidal person to end it all is effectively threatening their life. Then there’s verbal harassment, which can be a crime.
I can’t say I see any compelling interest for this sort of thing being freedom of speech. Can anyone give me an argument that this cannot be narrowly forbidden? Because otherwise I can’t see any non-murderous speech that would be infringed on.
(That’s unlike my naive idea as a child that lying should not be freedom of speech. There’s an argument that there are good reasons to lie. Though not an argument that slander and libel are useful to allow.)
This case is so unique with special circumstances. The victim was emotionally unstable and vulnerable. The convicted girl also had emotional issues. She seemed to have an agenda that’s still not fully understood.
This would be a terrible benchmark case for Free Speech. This exact situation with hundreds of texts may never happen in the same way again.
I hope the SCOTUS sees it that way and doesn’t hear the case. No matter which way they ruled it would only confuse the issue of free speech even more.
There’s also the overlap of assisted suicide. Again, this would be bad case to use as a precedent for any future cases.
You are correct. However the correctness of your self defense argument illustrates the legal cause of his death. He could not use lethal force against verbal, not threats, but counsels to commit suicide. He could have defended himself by blocking her texts, or most importantly by not rigging his truck and sitting inside of it. That was a voluntary act on his part, even if he was counseled to do it.
The argument that if not for her counseling he would not have done it places the causation issue too remotely to fairly apply the law. If my wife leaves me and I commit suicide one could accurately say in an abstract way that she was the cause of my death, but before this case nobody would seriously suggest that her actions were a legal cause of my death.
Would there be any scenario under which my wife could be charged with homicide under those circumstances? What she knew I had a history of mental health issues and attempted suicides? What if she told me on the way out the door I might as well just kill myself? What if she said it multiple times, but not to the extent this girl did?
Your point is taken in that this is an extreme case as the volume of messages and the mental health status of the young man make her far more culpable than any hypothetical one can imagine. But as for the future state of the law, where does that leave us? Would she not be guilty of homicide if there was no mental illness? If she had only said, say, half of what she said? How about one tenth?
As a person who wants to stay out of prison, what type of verbal comments may I make to someone and stay within the bounds of the law? This case could open a Pandora’s Box, but I hope it is just limited to its extreme facts.
It’s an interesting question. I’m not sure how her statements qualify as “threats.” She is not stating that she will harm the boy, she is encouraging him to harm himself. That doesn’t seem to me to meet the standard definition of a threat.
The verbal harassment angle seems suspect as well. If the language is unwelcome and harassing, then the remedy for that is to block her from your cellphone. Problem solved. The fact that he kept accepting her texts, reading and responding to them, seems to pretty conclusively prove that he did not consider them to be harassing.
Conspiracy to commit suicide? I like it, but I don’t think it fits. Basically a conspiracy is an agreement to commit a crime (and in some states one person commits an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy). In this case there is no agreement that they both will commit suicide or that they both will do anything. It is one sided: he will commit suicide and she will encourage it.
The speech that could be suppressed is those individuals and groups who advocate for legal suicide. Posters on this board have variously said at times that it should be the right of all adults to commit suicide if they deem it in their best interests and that in some cases, suicide is the best alternative, even when it is not in the terminal illness context. If a person takes that poster’s or that group’s argument to heart, commits suicide, and the causation can be shown, are these individuals or groups guilty of homicide? The logic of this case seems to suggest that they are or at least might be.
I’m simply worried that the extreme nature of this case will cause a bad legal result as applied to other cases. A case cannot be cabined to its own facts. I’m sure that the Suicide Rights Groups will be fine, but then what is the legal principle? That you can advocate for suicide and counsel to suicide so long as you don’t do it too much or too forcefully or are not too successful at it?
Please read what I asked. I did not say that she defrauded him.
I’m asking why you believe that if she were to manipulate him for her financial gain then you think that should be punished as a crime; but if she were to manipulate him for his death then it should not be a crime.
I don’t believe the issue of honesty enters into the question. If someone knows someone is in distress, they either have an obligation to help them or do no harm. I don’t think there’s a moral obligation to be honest if it could reasonably be foreseen that it would cause further harm.
I disagree, because the nature of the threat was not necessarily imminent, leaving no time for deliberation. But once the death occurred, it isn’t difficult to establish causation.
Let’s say for example, a manager orders a worker to enter a building with toxic gas. The worker isn’t justified in shooting the manager. But if the worker does enter, it’s reasonable to question whether the manager should be culpable for the worker’s death.
As there was time for the young man to deliberate, then in my mind that puts the causation on him. And, again, there was no threat from her.
I can think of no other case where causation is defined in this way. For intentional acts, the cause of a result is the act which naturally and without outside interference will lead to the result.
That seems to be why they got her on involuntary manslaughter under a negligence theory. But even under a negligence theory a supervening intentional act, especially a criminal one, serves to cut off liability. Further, under the open and obvious hazard doctrine, liability is cut off. Both of those seem to apply here.
For example, if I own a grocery store and during a snowstorm, snow and ice build up in the entranceway. If I don’t do my diligence in cleaning it up in a reasonable way, and you slip and fall on it, I may be liable for your injury. But if you see it, and get a running start to do your best ice skater impersonation and fall, then your intentional act cuts off my liability and the fact that the snow and ice were there for you to see makes it an open and obvious hazard.
Do both the manager and the worker know that the building is filled with lethal gas?
Do you hold the same standard for other victims of crime? If they have a chance to deliberate, then they are responsible for their own actions? For example, a mob boss threatens to murder a witness if they say certain things next week.
I don’t think that the witness would be justified in shooting the mob boss; nor that the mob boss would be exhonerated from suborning perjury.
If the worker knows that it is, and he feels compelled to take the risk and enter because his job is on the line, would you absolve the manager who also knows about the gas? I wouldn’t.
I think the hypo is inapt. The threat in the hypo is from an external source. Whether the witness goes to the police, lies on the stand, or tries to shoot the mob boss, he is facing an external danger.
My lethal force argument was premised on the positions of some posters, and indeed the Court in holding that this girl’s words created a situation that in his mental condition, he simply could not or was incapable of refusing. If he was capable of doing so, like most posters here would be, then she was not the cause of his death without dispute.
So, my hypo was suppose that she was physically there and saying all of those exact words, not using any physical force, but ten feet away telling him these things. And to make it consistent, suppose he has the power to mute her, like he could have on his cell phone. If the idea is that those words will cause him to commit suicide, for whatever reason, then those words are lethal, and he has a right to stop the lethality by using lethal force himself.
Of course it seems silly, but the reason it seems silly answers the case. The words themselves do not cause his suicide because he could have defended himself by not doing what she said and telling her to shut up.
So this is a possibility? The gas is dangerous, but not necessarily lethal? Then we have a different hypo. This boy knew that the gas in his truck was lethal. I cannot imagine a similar scenario where a worker wants to protect his job by dying.
If someone remains with a physically abusive spouse when they were physically capable of leaving the house does that relieve the abuser of responsibility? There are mental states where people actually can NOT stop abuse or harassment. The law recognizes that even if someone could have left an abusive scenario and did not the abuser is still guilty of abuse.
I agree, this is an extreme case and an outlier, but we might see it’s like again in the future with the on-going popularity of social media and texting.
Speaking as someone who actually works at a grocery/big box store - no, the latter scenario does NOT absolve the property owner. We get sued regularly by people who are doing dumb shit just like that.
Only the manager has to know for there to be culpability. Ordering someone into a hazardous environment violates various workplace safety regulations/laws, especially if you don’t inform the employee of the hazard and/or provide safety gear.
Do you believe all human beings should be held to this same standard, that they alone are responsible for their actions in the face of psychological pressure? Like, a child? An 80 year old with the beginnings of demensia? A former soldier with PTSD? Someone with extreme depression? In your opinion, are they are all equally capable of withstanding psychological manipulation, as for as the law is concerned?
For two years, my father’s bosses were doing their best to stress him, trying to get him to leave so they wouldn’t have to pay compensation. At the time they finally realized he was not capable of conceiving “quitting”, specially when a large chunk of that stress came in the form of attacks on his subordinates, he was on 4.5 packs a day - the tobacconist told him “I’m sorry you lost your job but happy you won’t be buying so much from me, sir”. If one of those 3am “you have to be here, 5 hours away, for an 8am meeting” had resulted in him crashing on the highway, I wouldn’t have thought his bosses were innocent of all wrongdoing, even though they weren’t specifically trying to get him to kill himself… just to get himself out of their hair.
UltraVires: you addressed all the ideas I had considered, but you seem to have not addressed the one that the judges seem to be using, about negligence, saying she had a duty to try and save him, and such. Would you address the reasoning in the appeals opinion please?
I also note that you appear to presume that he is of sound mind, but the whole point of this is that he was suicidally depressed. Deliberation, as I understand it, requires the ability to make rational decisions.
And, finally, my argument is that I can’t see how this case would not be an “island,” as the reasoning is fairly narrowly applied. Can you give an example of how the reasoning would lead to a bad outcome in another case? I don’t accept this principle you stated on faith, but need an actual reason. It’s easy to claim a law would be used in an undesirable way–you could use that for anything if you didn’t have to prove it.
I think I would argue her legal (if not moral) innocence regardless, but the case for her guilt becomes even weaker if you actually look at their communication over the course of their relationship. She was clearly not grooming him toward suicide. She expended a lot of emotional effort trying to convince him to seek help and not kill himself. He was the one IMO who was kind of a black hole who would have dragged anyone down, IMO.
When you say “guilty of abuse” you mean physical violence, right? If my spouse calls me all sorts of nasty names and tells me I should kill myself, she is certainly an abusive spouse, but she has not committed any crime.
Further, I am unsure about what you mean by social media. If I get on social media and call another person nasty names that isn’t a crime. Are you talking about a suicide after seeing negative postings on social media?
No I don’t, but if we are going to prosecute these things, there needs to be a line drawn. For all of the talk about how dreadfully mentally ill this young man was, he was not appointed a guardian and was free to live his life, sign contracts, get married, adopt children, buy firearms, etc. I think it would be fair to say that if the state has not taken any steps to restrict his freedom, or he doesn’t fall into any of those reasonable categories you listed, one might believe that he is not incompetent to read text messages and make his own decision.
The only evidence I have seen that he was mentally ill was his frequent suicide attempts. That seems to be bootstrapping. This application of the law would always have a “mentally ill” person on the other side because of his desire to commit suicide.
I agree. And she saw him try and fail suicide in the past. In her mind, she believed that suicide was the best thing for him. So she (forcefully) counseled him to do it.
The Court wrote a results oriented opinion which can always be determined when it has a long factual introduction, repeating the worst quotes, to make you hate the Defendant. Then it states over and over again that she “overbore his will.”
It then baldly asserts that the parade of horribles (doctors, counselors, suicide rights groups) “clearly” won’t face prosecution under this statute (and it carefully adds the qualifier of “terminal illness”) because their conduct does not “overbear the will” of a “mentally ill person.” But its logic doesn’t follow.
Any person who commits suicide is mentally ill according to the Court. Any encouragement to commit suicide, by definition, overbears the will because of this mental illness, except maybe unless you only state your opinions gently enough.
I’m not sure how the Court can simply declare that counseling someone to commit suicide will not fall under the law. If text message is too coercive, then I think a face to face conversation would be even more so.