What the Law Doesn’t Know About Suicide

Most of us insist that it is wrong to take one’s own life. We conceive both a religious and a moral ‘duty’ to maintain life. Christianity abhors suicide as contradicting its doctrine of sanctity of human life and Koran expressly inhibits it. In this sanctity, there is no difference between murder and suicide. This Christian sentiment, more than anything else, must have influenced English moral development and consequently the English Common law development.

Blackstone thinks that both God and the King were violated by suicide, for who commits suicide ‘invades the prerogative of the almighty and rushing into his presence uncalled for and for the king who has an interest in the preservation of his subject’.

Our moral value in Nigeria is no different, even while oblivious of English moral impulses and common law. In many traditions of Nigeria, suicide victims were buried in dense forests to show our disdain for their ‘ill choices’.

We must at least accede to this very thing that laws are habitually reflective of the morals, values and opinion of society. If there are instances in which law and morality parley, it is in the instances of the laws against suicide and its attempt. And so against this backdrop, the words of the Nigerian law saying that any person who attempts to kill himself is guilty of a misdemeanour punishable by one year imprisonment, must also be understood.

But have we really preserved our lives because of this legal duty to do so together with the sanction that ‘butters’ it? Does the law re
Ibe Ikwechegh the lAW & yoU What the Law Doesn’t Know About Suicide ally think that our efforts to nurture life and keep it emanates out of any sense of duty to the law or fear of punishment? Does the punishment serve any useful purposes?

Duty carries with it the connotation of unwillingness, burden and drudgery. The task of living is not such. We love our lives. We cherish them and do all within our powers to preserve them. It seems more likely to just say that we strive to live because we love our lives and are predisposed to keep it, with self preservation being our mentor.

We preserve our lives as law requires but not necessarily in fidelity to law as it is to inclination and desire. This inclination subsists as long as we enjoy life, as long as the relish for it remains or at least as long as good hope abides. 

But it could happen that adversities and pain will take away every sweetness to life. Can the law really sustain any effort to preserve life in such moment of eerie darkness in which no light of hope is ever cast?

It is perhaps then that no philosophy would offer any more profound meaning or exert any more direct influence than that which assures man that ending pain is nothing but both a rational choice and an expression of autonomy. It is this pragmatic philosophy that the law is up against.

To criminalise suicide then seems analogous to criminalizing despair, disillusionment, depression and disease all which are completely outside the realms of duty. It is possible that the Church of England saw this as far back as in 1958 when it examined issues concerning criminal prosecution against persons who attempted suicide and published a book titled ‘Ought Suicide to be a Crime’ which documenting their report urging that attempted suicide should cease to be a crime.

Like some oxymoron, the law has not asked us to take better shelter from the things that put us at risk of suicide nor is it watching out for any of our lapses in that respect. In legislating on suicide, the law draws a blurry line between an omission and a commission. We can omit to take all necessary steps to preserve life, to cloth the body or to medicate for illnesses but we may not actively take a positive step to end our lives.

Beyond indistinct lines of passivity and activity, we suspect that the law sees suicide as behaviour. Those who commit suicide are not in the common run of criminals. The aim is not to harm anyone else but to end their own pains. Except in cases of mental diseases, accident, and drug use, a great number of those who commit suicide pass through the process of darkness, despair and resolve. There is something about cause and effect which is resonant with suicide. The law which focuses on effect and response

“One of the easiest things in life is to judge others. One of the simplest things we can ever do is to tell how wrong people are. One of the most thoughtless things we can ever do is to show people their faults unconstructively. It is always so easy and common to do such things but, before you do that, find the uncommon reasons for the faulty life.Yes! before you do that, identify how to correct a faulty life and before you do that, think of what drives and invokes the joy, slothfulness or the melancholy in people. Until you go through what people have been through, until you experience what has become a part of people, until you understand what drives the real interest of people and until you become fully aware of the real vision, aspirations, desires and the needs of others, ponder before you criticize!”
–Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

and blind sighted to causes will remain ineffectual in addressing the problems.

At the centre of most suicide is depression. Yet depression only in the eyes of the law may not meet the threshold of insanity, enough to provide exculpation. But depression is as bad as insanity, depriving us of the volition to sound judgment. As lately as in 2014 , the World Health Organization for the first time saw suicide as a disease and by that brought it within its scope of affairs. Invariably, the law chooses to discriminate and punish for the disease of depression and spare malaria and glaucoma.

Suicidal instinct longs for love, for emotion, for genuine human sympathy, for touch, for a heart to heart talk and understanding which cannot be provided for by criminalizing it. Charles Edward Garman, who was professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at Amherst, taught that ‘it is the contact of mind with mind that is the only condition of a human life’. We must add that it is a vital therapy for suicidal instincts. A common thread among people who committed or attempted suicide is that either they could not share their grief or their grief was never understood. A mechanism for this mind to mind scheme for solving suicidal problem is not something beyond the realm of the law. Units can be developed at work places, schools and other of such didactic institutions to deal with the emotional demands of citizens. Rather than criminalize suicide, the law probably needs to criminalize lack of care for suicidal people and bad press on something so profound.

Our punitive law for attempted suicide does not square up well with our criminal justice theory of punishment. It does not protect society since no one else is supposedly at risk except the attempter who is both the criminal and the victim. There is no evidence that it deters future attempt. After Ogunwande was arrested for his attempt to kill himself at the Lekki toll bridge, he attempted a second time while in police custody. Rehabilitation is a ‘fleeting illusion’, for any effective rehabilitation must address the specific rehabilitation need. Lastly, to say that it is retributive is to insult the question. Retribution ‘demands an eye for an eye’, and perhaps with this thought, one Titilayo Momoh said to the Ebute-Meta Magistrate’s court, ‘I never tried to kill anybody, it is myself that I wanted to kill’.

Rehabilitation, deterrence, incapacitation, retribution and all other of our theories of punishment run aground in suicide. Criminalizing suicide attempt may at best intensify the effort so as not to fall short of its goal.

The weak still deserve the sympathy and the help of legal institutions and the law. Indeed the law must apprehend the moral, social, psychological, and philosophical underpinnings of the problems of suicide and create institutions of help and succour and not only ones for vilification and punishment. L&S