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Which actions should we count as suicides?
Published in Govert den Hartogh, What Kind of Death, 2023
But even in a jurisdiction in which no right to suicide is recognized, the kind of palliative care that we are presently discussing need not be punishable. It is permissible for a doctor to offer a painkilling drug to a patient that he knows will probably shorten her life in addition to ending her suffering, even though his action will in many jurisdictions satisfy all conditions for classifying that action as some kind of homicide. As long as he acts on a proper medical indication and satisfies a proportionality requirement, what he does will be morally and legally all right. His action will be considered a justifiable homicide, or not a homicide at all. (As we have seen already in Section 4.1, this need not depend on the doctor's intention.) In this case the doctor may properly judge alleviation of the patient's suffering to be more important than the foreseeable shortening of her life. The same reasoning applies when someone decides to end his life by abstaining from taking fluids. If a doctor provides the necessary care in such a case, the law and professional morality could and should recognize a similar exception to the prohibition of assistance and consider the doctor's action either a justifiable assistance or no assistance at all.52
Crime Statistics
Published in Burkhard Madea, Asphyxiation, Suffocation,and Neck Pressure Deaths, 2020
Homicide is defined as the act of one human killing another. Homicides can be divided into many overlapping legal categories such as murder, manslaughter, justifiable homicide, killing in war, euthanasia and capital punishment.
Vital Statistics and Arrest-Related Deaths
Published in Darrell L. Ross, Gary M. Vilke, Guidelines for Investigating Officer-Involved Shootings, Arrest-Related Deaths, and Deaths in Custody, 2018
Darrell L. Ross, Michael Brave
The SHR captures deaths by location of the offense and includes all homicides occurring in state and local law enforcement jurisdictions. There are limitations with the data reported in the SHR and caution must be used when reviewing the data. First, reporting information to the FBI is voluntary and many law enforcement agencies either do not consistently submit SHR forms or just do not submit any forms at all. Second, some SHR forms reporting a homicide are incomplete and are missing data. Third, SHR data forms have changed over the years, increasing or deleting some features of the event. Fourth, the SHR does not include homicide information pertaining to federal law enforcement agencies, federal prisons, military bases, or Indian reservations. Fifth, the SHR data are reflective of a homicide investigation conducted by the police and do not reflect the outcome of decisions made by a prosecutor or the courts. Sixth, the number of incidents involving a non-justifiable homicide by police in the United States is unknown. There is nothing that distinguishes murders by an officer from murders committed by another. Seventh, there are no official statistics recorded of where a police officer was justified in killing a suspect but instead decided to use non-lethal force. Due to these limitations, reliable information regarding the number of justifiable homicides committed by the police does not exist, general estimates therefore are made on the available data, and caution should be used when examining the data (Geller & Geller, 1992; Klinger, 2012; Loftin et al., 2003).
Life After Brain Death
Published in Journal of Legal Medicine, 2021
If it is ethically permissible to harvest the organs of BD patients because of their actual biological status, then it need not be reliant on such patients being labeled as dead but instead because we think it is permissible to treat them like they are dead. Again, the biology of a patient remains the same regardless of whether they are labeled BD, PNI, or with any other terminology.28 And the ethics that are derived from judgments about that biology should also remain the same and allow for currently legally permissible medical procedures, including organ donation, to take place even without a BD label. New terminology for a transplant surgeon’s actions when harvesting organs from a PNI patient may be helpful for use in discourse and statutes. The term “voluntary patient organ donation” (VPOD) captures the procedure well in that it focuses on the autonomy of the patient (voluntary patient) and the purpose of the surgery (organ donation). In this way, it is better than terms like “euthanasia” or “medically justifiable homicide,” which draw focus to the ending of the life.
Donor Rules—Dead and Living
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2023
The “Dead Donor Rule” (DDR) is an important injunction shaping the field of organ retrieval and scholarly assessments of specific retrieval practices’ permissibility (e.g., Pasquerella, Smith, and Ladd 2001). As formulated by John A. Robertson (1999), the DDR is an “ethical and legal rule that requires that donors not be killed in order to obtain their organs.” Put another way, the removal of organs for transplantation (even with voluntary donor consent) does not negate ethical and legal culpability for causing a donor’s death by transforming it into an instance of justifiable homicide (Robertson 1999; Veatch 2004).