The Kansas House on Thursday passed legislation that will make it easier for prosecutors to make a case against anyone who encourages someone to commit suicide.
The House voted 119-1 to pass a bill that makes it explicitly illegal to knowingly encourage another person to commit or attempt to commit suicide.
“I believe this is a pro-life bill that both sides of the aisle should support,” said Republican state Rep. Bob Lewis of Garden City.
The bill was born out of couple of cases, including one from Wichita where a 21-year-old man died by suicide after two people who knew him sent him text messages encouraging him to take his own life.
There was another case from Johnson County where a 23-year-old Lenexa man died by suicide after turning to a website with instructions on how to take his life.
The Legislature took action after hearing impassioned pleas from parents who lost children to suicide, either because they were encouraged or because they visited websites that showed them how to take their lives.
“It is imperative that we do whatever we can to protect vulnerable people while they are struggling, and in their darkest moments,” said Kelli Wilson, whose 18-year-old son died by suicide in 2020 after visiting a website showing how he could take his life.
“It is no secret that the way people communicate has drastically changed over the years,” she said. “The common denominator here is that the people that are encouraging suicide,
sharing methods and method sources, are online and anonymous.
“Time and time again, I have had to use the media to bring awareness to this, and I’m not sure why something so sinister is still actively occurring.”
One of the more high profile examples that Kansas is trying to address was a Massachusetts case where a teen girl was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter as a youthful offender in connection with her boyfriend’s suicide.
In a series of text messages with her boyfriend, the girl encouraged her boyfriend to kill himself and told him when and how he should kill himself.
“It is horrific to know that individuals can bully or encourage your child to end their own life without consequences – especially when those individuals know that your child is considering or planning to die by suicide,” said Amy Campbell, lobbyist for the Kansas Mental Health Coalition.
During the debate over the bill, concerns were raised about what implications the bill might have for free speech rights.
There are 12 states that have laws on the books that address assisting suicide, according to the Board of Indigent Defense Services.
The board found two instances – in California and Minnesota – where similar types of laws were challenged.
In 1992, the California Court of Appeals found that the law did not violate the First Amendment. Critical in that case, the California Supreme Court interpreted the statute to
require direct conduct such as furnishing a weapon or other means to commit suicide.
In 2014, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that a law that prohibited “encouraging” or “advising” suicide violated free-speech rights.
The girl in the Massachusetts case asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review her conviction, claiming that it violated her First Amendment rights. The court didn’t hear the case.
Republican state Rep. Brenda Landwehr, chair of the House health committee, wouldn’t make any promises about the legal fate of the bill.
“We don’t know how this will stand up in the courts,” Landwehr said.
“But I think it’s a move that Kansas should make so we can find out what will, and maybe we’ll be the state that proves it.”
Kansas recorded 591 suicide deaths in 2022, a 6.5% increase from 555 in 2021, according to a report compiled by the state health department.
The suicide age-adjusted death rate increased from 19.2 deaths per 100,000 population
in 2021 to 20.3 deaths in 2022.
Even though the single-year change in rate was not statistically significant, the suicide rate in 2022 was the highest in the last 20 years, the report said.
About 82% of suicide victims were male. The three age groups with the largest number of suicides were: 25-34 (123 deaths), 35-44 (114 deaths) and 15-24 (98 deaths).
The most common methods of suicide were firearms (347 deaths), suffocation (142 deaths) and poisoning (69 deaths).
