Abstract
Law treats suicide as malfeasance—a display of mental illness and, worse, a ghost crime that has never left us. While states no longer criminally punish suicide, they detain and force mental-health treatment on many who attempt it, or indicate they might attempt it, and threaten criminal sanctions against those who aid or encourage it. For these and other reasons, the suicide label functions not merely as a description of an event but as a censure. A lengthy, legal history, fueled originally by religion but then tempered by pragmatism, led to these circumstances and can largely rationalize relevant legal doctrines and practices as they currently operate. Yet a countervailing view of consensually hastened deaths as often acceptable has powered a continuing movement for reform. It is possible to envision in the distant future the culmination of this effort in the acceptance of suicide as a right or privilege. However, the movement in its present stages has sought to elide rather than directly challenge law’s suicide prohibition. Success has come most notably through legislated suicide exemptions in several states that authorize doctors to prescribe for certain terminally ill patients a lethal dose of medicine that the patient can self-administer. More states will likely follow what has already begun. But if the exemption movement is not to stall with terminally ill patients who self-administer prescribed medicine, what is the immediate path forward? This Article distinguishes between advances that can be achieved without defying the negative conceptions of suicide that currently prevail and other advances that would begin to seriously undermine law’s anti-suicide regime. In the former category are exemptions that cover consensually hastened deaths that are plausibly called natural and other exemptions for deaths that, with changes to official reporting practices, can at least be characterized as not suicide (or homicide). Yet this Article concludes that there is no apparent inflection point along the way that can define an area of potentially permanent stasis. Law’s anti-suicide system may well continue evolving through the distant future until suicide becomes a right or privilege
Recommended Citation
Scott W. Howe,
Suicide’s Shadow: The Evolution of a Ghost Crime,
90 Mo. L. Rev.
(2025)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/mlr/vol90/iss2/5