His wife then put the car in gear, locked the doors and drove off the cliff [with her 3- and 5-year old children in the backseat], the police said.
He was indicted on charges of promoting a suicide attempt, two counts of reckless endangerment and two counts of endangering the welfare of a child. The police said he ‘afforded her an opportunity to carry out her intentions.'” (New York Times )
Luckily the children survived with only minor injuries (excluding their psychological traumatization, of course), while their mother died. Unlike the husband’s heinous endangerment of his children, the charge of ‘promoting a suicide attempt’ seems arbitrary and dubious, to my way of thinking. I wonder how often people are prosecuted on this charge, and how often a conviction is obtained. My suspicion is that that law is being misapplied beyond its original purpose of preventing Kevorkian-like assisted suicides, although I acknowledge that I do not know all the details of this case.
In my work as a clinical psychiatrist, frequently treating people hospitalized after suicide attempts, I often see situations in which (even excluding the egregious instances in which angry bystanders have goaded a person threatening suicide to “go ahead and do it”) a family member or other close associate has failed to prevent or discourage an attempt in someone who in 20/20 hindsight they might have had reason to believe was suicidal. People go out and leave a depressed person alone; they try less hard than they can to get the affected person into mental health treatment; they do too little to prevent access to alcohol or other disinhibiting substances that make suicide more likely, or they fail to prevent access to lethal means used to make an attempt. They fail to do enough to reassure a person fearful of abandonment or vulnerable to criticism or self-reproach. Are they to blame in those instances? By definition, psychiatrist Leston Havens once observed, suicide comes when least expected.
Arguably, no one besides a health professional has a responsibility to prevent another’s suicide, it seems to me, and no one, including a health professional, has an obligation to foresee the unforeseeable. Assessing suicide risks is one of the most challenging aspects of mental health work, requiring sophistication, experience, aplomb… and the ability to bear being wrong. Those of us who full well have an obligation to prevent suicide know that it is not a matter of if, but merely of when, we will fail to do so. Can we expect members of the lay public to unambiguously assess when someone close to them represents a true threat?
And where exactly do we draw the line? Is there a specific moment when the need to walk on eggshells around the vulnerable individual kicks in? Suicide often — although not invariably — occurs in an interpersonal context; should there be a moral obligation to conduct ourselves so no potentially vulnerable person around us is ever emotionally hurt by us? In an ideal world, perhaps, but not in the world I live in.
Update: more details in this New York Times article, including the following:
…Promoting a suicide attempt is an unusual charge, law professors and prosecutors said yesterday.
“As a prosecutor for a lot of years in the Manhattan D.A.’s office and now over 10 years here, I’ve never seen it charged,” said Louis E. Valvo, the chief assistant district attorney for Rockland County, whose office is handling the case… By early yesterday, the park police were accusing Mr. Han of abetting his wife’s suicide, and some legal experts were saying that it would be hard to make the charge stick.
Michael T. Cahill, an assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, said the provision appeared to have been part of the state penal code that was enacted in the mid-1960’s.
“The language of the provision is that you have to cause or aid another person’s suicide attempt,” he said, “and I wouldn’t think that just leaving the car would amount to aiding another person’s suicide attempt.””
