Suicide Laws in England

 

 

My good friend and co-host, Mike Dunn expressed surprise when I said during last week program that suicide was long considered a felony in England. “You mean ‘attempted’ suicide?” he asked. Nope – I mean actual suicide. It was long regarded as a felony in England. There are two reasons, one political, and other religious.

 

The felony

 

English authorities classified suicide as murder because it consisted of the same elements — the taking of a life with malice aforethought.

 

Consider the case of Hale v. Petit, decided by the King’s Bench in the year 1562. It is one of the earliest reported English suicide cases. A coroner’s jury decided that Sir James Hales had committed suicide by drowning himself in a river. Accordingly, the court found Sir Hales guilty of murder. In so doing, the court had this to say:

 

 [A]s to the quality of the offence which Sir James has here committed . . . it is in a degree of murder, and not of homicide or manslaughter, for homicide is the killing of a man feloniously without malice prepense, but murder is the killing a man with malice prepense. And here the killing of himself was prepensed and resolved in his mind before the act was done.

 

The fact that the perpetrator and the victim were the same person did not change the conclusion. The court simply explained that “Sir James Hales being alive caused Sir James Hales to die; and the act of the living man was the death of the dead man.”

 

The Reason

 

But what is the point of finding a dead man guilty of a felony?

 

In England one of the punishments for a felony is that the felon forfeited all of his property, real and personal, to the King. So the King was very interested in adjudicating these cases even after the death of the alleged felon.

 

But there was a religious reason too.  Suicide had long been considered a mortal sin in the eyes of the Church. England punished suicides by denying them Christian burials. They were buried at night at crossroads in the highway with stakes driven through their bodies.

 

So the man who committed suicide was punished quite severely in England: all of his property went directly to the King and his soul went directly to the Devil. That’ll teach him.

 

The Law in England Today

 

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the English public began calling for the abolition the penalties for suicide. Reacting to this public sentiment, Parliament gradually removed the punishments for suicide. In 1823 the Right to Burial Act ended the tradition of ignominious burial at the highway. In 1870, the Abolition of Forfeiture Acts removed the penalty of forfeiting all of the suicide’s property to the Crown.

 

Committing suicide remained a felony, albeit without any punishment, until the Suicide Act of 1961 made it no longer a crime to commit suicide in England.

 

And America?

 

The United States never widely adopted the English practice of forfeiture. And with our tradition of separating matters of religion from matters of state, the states generally let individual religious sects to determine for themselves whether to provide a Christian burial for their members who committed suicide.

 

Ergo, in the United States, suicide traditionally has generally not been considered a crime. I am aware of no state that has actually enacted a statute making suicide a crime. There are a small minority of states that still consider it a common law (judge made law, as opposed to legislative law) crime, but those states do not prosecute it.

 

Many Thanks

 

My thanks to Attorney Benjamin P. Fay for his Note, THE INDIVIDUAL VERSUS SOCIETY: THE CULTURAL DYNAMICS OF CRIMINALIZING SUICIDE, 18 Hastings Int’l & Comp. L. Rev. 591. Most of the information contained in this brief blog came from Mr. Fay’s article.

 

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