Suicide facilitation as a form of murder for hire
Japanese laws are profoundly different from the laws that govern the United States, of course, but this story caught my eye this morning anyway. The Japanese proprietor of an unnamed Web site containing instructions on how to commit suicide has been arrested for allegedly killing a woman who asked him to help her die.
What’s the moral difference, if any, between providing a woman with the information she needs to end her own life and actually ending it for her? In the second case, of course, it’s murder; the unlawful killing of another person has been illegal since we invented laws. But what kind of moral responsibility can be attributed to the person who encourages and assists, rather than carrying out the act himself?
Consider murder-for-hire for a moment. I want someone to die. I contact a third person and offer something — money, maybe — if that person will kill the person I want dead. Have I violated a law? Yes, absolutely. Title 18 of the United States Code, section 1958 says that anyone who causes another person to cross a state line with the intent that murder will result can be imprisoned for up to twenty years, or if death occurs, for the rest of his life.
Somebody who hires a hit man didn’t commit murder with his own hands. But he caused the death of another person, by setting the murder in motion. If not for that act, the murder would not have occurred.
The statistics are very foggy, but for every death by suicide in the United States, there are somewhere between eight and 25 unsuccessful attempts. That doesn’t count, of course, the number of people who feel suicidal but do not act on it, or the number of people who attempt suicide in ways that don’t get recorded as such by health-care professionals. Whatever the precise numbers, the fact is undeniable that, compared to the number of people who consider or unsuccessfully attempt suicide, the number of people who take their own lives is vanishingly small.
That means that if you’re feeling suicidal, the odds, purely statistically, that you will die by your own hand are tiny. Statistically, a suicidal person almost certainly will not end up committing suicide.
So what does this mean in context of the murder-for-hire law? Hiring someone to commit murder is a crime because in the absence of that act, the death would not have occurred. Sure, lightning could have struck the intended victim, or the victim could have been caught in some unrelated act of violence that results in death. But the odds that the person would have died due to unrelated causes are vanishingly small. So the law says that a person who hires a killer is fully responsible for the death of the person killed.
Is it not equally reasonable, then, to say that the person who encourages, facilitates or otherwise assists in a successful suicide attempt, even at a distance and purely over the Internet, is responsible for the death of the suicidal person?
We’ve received a lot of feedback about H.R. 940 over the past few days. One of the comments we’ve heard more than once is, “A suicidal person will find a way no matter what, so how can you punish someone who provides information?” The statistics, however, do not bear this out. The vast majority of people who have suicidal thoughts never attempt suicide, and the vast majority of people who do attempt suicide are not successful. Taking measured, specific action with the clear intent to push someone out of the majority and into that tiny minority cannot be defended with “Well, she would have found a way anyway.” Because the odds are overwhelming — like Vegas odds — that she wouldn’t have.