It’s not an extreme case, an extreme case would be the mass suicide in Jamestown by the followers of Jim Jones. The scale is different but exploiting psychological vulnerabilities in people to drive them into self harm is nothing new or unusual.
I am sure individuals being brought to the point of suicide by manipulative partners (deliberately or not) is a daily occurrence.
Anyone see any information on how it was resolved?
It was dismissed “with prejudice and without costs”.
Well, at least she’s not saddled with that debt hanging over her.
Two points:
Can you advocate for suicide so long as you aren’t very successful at doing so? If one person dies because of your advocacy are you guilty of murder? If X number?
Or is it the fact that this was a direct one on one conversation? Can a person only advocate for suicide in a general sense, but not to one person where it might have an effect?
This would be highly unusual for a free speech doctrine.
Further, this is not like slipping shellfish into someone’s food. This guy made the choice himself. She didn’t push him into the truck. His survival was entirely in his own hands. He was free to disregard her urgings and not commit suicide. That fact makes the proximate cause aspect very troubling.
Not necessarily. I’m not sure about Massachusetts, but in West Virginia, a conviction of a criminal offense automatically means that you must make restitution to your victim and the civil suit becomes unnecessary. Perhaps that is what happened here.
Direct instructions can fall into one of the acknowledged first amendment exceptions: incitement to violence. There is a great big difference between the almost certainly legal publishing of instructions to make a weapon, and taking those instructions, handing them to you, UltraVires, and saying, “build this and use it on that person over there.”
This case was always a better candidate for a civil trial instead of criminal.
Prosecution for text messages that repeatedly urged someone to kill themselves is new legal ground. That’s why it went all the way to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
Seems unlikely that Michelle Carter won’t pay some restitution to the family.
I don’t think that the analogy holds. In the first case, the person is giving instruction on how to build a weapon. The second case, the person is advocating the use of the weapon.
In my example, the suicide advocacy groups are flat out saying that if you want to end your own life, that is/should be your right to do so. It is certainly foreseeable, and has likely happened many times, that a person on the edge has read that material and decided to complete suicide because of it.
IOW, in my example the advocacy is a direct advocacy of the harm the government seeks to prevent. In your example, it is one step removed. I could use that weapon you showed me how to build for personal protection or target shooting. When you tell me to use it on a person, that crosses the line.
There is no otherwise proper advocacy of suicide.
One is compelled to wonder how (the Hon.) Mr. Mill would approach this question in the instance where the opinion in controversy is “I passionately advocate that the interests of [the person contemplating suicide] would be best served by the cessation of [that person’s] existence.”
I think it is a weaker civil case than it was a criminal case. She was not the proximate cause of his injury therefore she is not liable.
The kid was the proximate cause of his own injuries as he had the opportunity to avoid all harm by simply not rigging his vehicle with CO poison and not sitting in it after knowing he rigged it.
It is an intentional act which almost always served to break any chain in causation.
I read the entire decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and it addresses the First Amendment objections voiced by some here. I very much doubt SCOTUS would rule differently, should they even take the case. Before I get to that, though, let me caution against the assumption that the young victim in this case can be understood merely by imagining our presumably healthy selves into his situation. We can’t even understand by imagining our [formerly, I hope] depressed selves into his situation. This was someone who’d been overwhelmed by depression and anxiety for a very long time. It’s obvious from reading about the case and the texting transcripts that his ability to make autonomous decisions and withstand manipulation was limited.
Here are relevant excerpts from the decision. Emphasis is mine.
<snip>
I read the decision as well and it is filled with question begging. It simply assumes that her words caused the death while failing to address hundreds of years of common law precedent regarding causation.
And, again, respectfully, you do the same by describing the decedent with words that would make him seem to be a child or a ward of the state. Of course he had some depression issues, or else he wouldn’t have considered suicide in the first place.
That has serious issues for freedom of speech in that suicide advocacy groups would logically fall under this umbrella. I could agree or disagree with their arguments and not commit suicide because I don’t have the desire to commit suicide. But if these groups must constrain their message so as not to influence the single person most likely to be influenced by their speech, then they might as well not speak at all.
And this “suicide as a crime” horseshit is just that. It is not in the statute, but a common law crime. Obviously nobody has ever been prosecuted for committing suicide, and I’ll bet nobody has ever been prosecuted for attempted suicide. It goes against modern reason and logic to prosecute it and the Legislature has not seen fit to codify it as a crime. If the Court is going to dust off and confirm these crimes, it is hard to see why they should not allow a prosecution for being a common scold, or adultery, or fornication.
And how far does it go? If a family member is diagnosed with a terminal illness and I advise them to forego chemotherapy, am I guilty of this crime? Oh, it’s different, you say? I don’t see that distinction made in any principled way in the opinion.
Perhaps you equate the very real effects of anxiety with childishness, but that’s not the way it works. Let me put it succinctly. Anxiety has been shown to cause chemical changes that affect the neurons in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that enables you to make decisions. A highly intelligent, very mature individual with severe anxiety may well be unable to make decisions because the part of the brain that allows him to do that has been affected.
Do you get it now?
If you read the decision, you must have scanned it very quickly to have missed the section dealing with this. Here’s part of it.
I really do urge you to read the decision again. Perhaps if you reread the decision, you could quote specific passages where the court “begs the question.” Either way, it’s well worth a second or even a third read, I think.
Everything Ultravires said, except that I wish they would not use the archaic and hurtful terminology “commit suicide”.
If he had been legally classified as a vulnerable adult, had some other party as his legal guardian, it would be a wholly different matter. You can argue that he should have been so classified. But he was not. Maybe that failure to get him declared incompetent to manage his own affairs means his parents were the true killers.
Do you get that this is true for every decision anyone makes that we consider “bad” or harmful in some way? Libertarian free will does not exist; therefore, any harmful or foolish decision anyone makes is because there is “something wrong with their brain”.
But that doesn’t “deal with it” except in the most superficial way. All it really says is “but this doesn’t apply to difficult end-of-life decisions”. There is no actual logic there to explain why it would apply to one but not the other, except for the implicit appeal to the majority: one kind of advocacy would horrify most people, and the other would only probably horrify a minority of people (like strict Catholics). And they had just pointed out that “the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable”. So where is the actual argument? I don’t see one.
The case being “resolved” means they stopped the suit. One way this happens is if they’ve already agreed on a monetary settlement without involving the courts.
She may have already paid–or at least agreed to do so.
There is no such legal classification. It is simply an acknowledgement of his diagnosis making him vulnerable. He was diagnosed with severe clinical depression, a mental disorder, and had progressed to the point of being suicidally depressed. Such an individual is inherently in a vulnerable position to those who would try to get them to kill themselves.
This is not remotely true. Some mental states are diseased, and some are not. We have an entire science devoted to determining the difference. Depression is a real thing, and it causes a disordered form of thinking. The person feels bad about themselves despite there being no reason to feel such. The person has false view of the world around them. They have an inability to feel emotions. And they experience extreme mental anguish that leads them to consider suicide, and some to actually attempt it.
We know from the interaction with her that, when push came to shove, he decided he didn’t want to kill himself after all. But she coerced him into doing it anyways. We know that the guy did not want to die. But she took advantage of his diseased state and coerced him into ending his life.
There’s nothing superficial about it at all. It makes a claim, and then cites the case law that establishes that claim.* Carter I*, 474 Mass. at 636 is the law.* Texas v. Johnson*, 491 U.S. 397, 414 (1989) is the law.
There are already laws that keep what UltraVires claims from being a problem. This is a narrow tailored decision. The decision is limited to cases where some actively uses their words to cause a mentally ill individual to commit harm upon their person involuntarily.
I’m not sure what other terminology one is supposed to use these days - please, do enlighten the rest of us. It’s an inherently hurtful situation - first, the person killing themselves (is that also hurtful terminology? What do you do when an accurate description of an event is hurtful?) then the on-going pain in the survivors. I’m not sure there’s any way to refer to it that doesn’t cause hurt.
ORLY?
:dubious:
BTW, what is your evidence that this guy had no reason to feel bad about himself?
So they cannot feel emotions…but they “experience extreme mental anguish”? 
Ok then. :rolleyes: