Compulsion, Volition, Intent: Assessing Criminal Culpability in Suicide by Proxy Trials

Suicidal murderers presented themselves at courthouses and offered their unsolicited confessions to startled authorities. Prosecutors then launched comprehensive investigations. They interrogated the perpetrators at length and interviewed their families, neighbors and witnesses to determine the killers’ reputation, prior conduct and demeanor. Investigators explored the life circumstances that prompted defendants’ suicidal intent in the first place, and how they arrived at the decision to commit murder. Defendants’ emotions and mental state were crucial factors in determining the criminal intent necessary for conviction, so interrogators made careful note of non-verbal cues—sighs, tears, facial expression, gestures, posture, and demeanor. They commissioned reports on the defendants by local physicians and clergy, and by university law and medical faculties. These sources make it possible to compile emotional profiles of perpetrators, from several points of view. In their own words, defendants “laid bare their heart,” not only because interrogators pressed them to do so, but because a fulsome confession to worldly authorities was an essential element of the crime. Witness testimony reveals dynamics of interpersonal relations of perpetrators within their communities, and how people read emotions of others in daily life. The subjectivity of perpetrators revealed in these sources changed over time. Around 1700 perpetrators claimed to have acted in response to demonic instigation. Indeed, sometimes they saw Satan incarnate. By the late eighteenth century perpetrators had undergone a kind of intrapsychic secularization. Satan had faded into amorphous compulsion or passive fatalism. Courts applied gendered emotional norms in judging such defendants: rage in women was seen as a reflection of particular malice, whereas the rage of a male murderer was justified as a righteous defense of his honor. Judges’ responses also became more secular: around 1700 they condemned suicidal despair in men as diabolical; by 1790 they described it as “unmanly.”