Pursuit of Redemption

Even the summer heat seemed to have parted in favor of a cooler more humid Monday morning. Elisha sighed, sipping on her morning coffee as she walked out of her favorite coffee pit stop on her way to work. Today was not going to be a pleasant day at work. But then again, with Elisha’s job description pleasant days are hard to come by.

Elisha Smee was the lead on field agent of the newly established government bureau, SPRA; Suicide Prevention and Regulation Authority. SPRA was just one of the many new government avenues that had come up to combat a literally deadly spike in the suicide rates among the public for the year 2020. Statistics had shown that every nine men in 15, committed suicide before they reached an age of 55 and every 5 women in 25, followed a similar path. Suicide had reached a point in the year 2020 that every night hospitals reported more than 5-10 cases of suicide, each. A government hence felt an urgent need to save the situation. The matter was brought in front of the parliament and a consensus was reached to criminalize the act of suicide. What more could after all be expected by a parliament mainly composed of conservative, rigid politicians backed by religious zealots?

Thus, the private suicide hotlines were abolished and the government established the SRPA. The start department of the SRPA was a task force with the same jurisdiction as the FBI, who had the duty to investigate people potentially inclined towards suicide as well as cases of attempted suicide and bring them into custody. The SRPA did consist of a propaganda unit, called We Care. Its main purpose was to motivate tax payers and tell the citizenry that suicide is not the solution; that there is a better world out there. But all that it did was to spread messages about how suicide would be a one way ticket to the pits of hell. The director general of We Care after all was Pastor John George. Apart from the SRPA, the new laws also created a special addition to the justice system, known as the suicide courts. The suicide courts had the function to carry out the trials of the ‘suicide offenders’ and bring them to justice. The public including Elisha was unsure what this justice really was.

Today was the first day of the trials. In the two weeks, that the SRPA had been active following the new change in laws, Elisha’s team had brought over 30 suicide offenders into custody. Most of them were people suspected of suicidal thoughts and attempts, but there were four very ‘dangerous’ offenders who had actually been caught after failed suicide attempts. Today’s trial was for these four. Elisha was still torn on the sensibility of criminalizing suicidal people but something had to be done with the critical level of suicide cases Elisha had done her sociology doctorate specializing on suicide analysis and had since then, published several books about the subject. She had also worked in a suicide hotline and her vast knowledge and experience had got her the job as the leader of the task force. But she of course had to be trained in combat because now this was a criminal matter.

Elisha was one of the professionals who had given government expert opinion against criminalizing suicide but the zealots had won. And now she was ready to try out this alternative to test the SRPA’s efficiency in curbing suicide rates. ‘Today would be the first real test,’ she thought as she put on her helmet and geared up her bike, ready to see what the day held for.

Five hours later, Elisha walked out of the court house, feeling dishevelled and agitated. The first suicide trials of the country has*(had) been the most ridiculous thing Elisha had seen in her professional career. These five years had made it shockingly obvious to Elisha that the criminal justice system is the worst possible way of dealing with suicide cases.

For starters, the jury was not the usual randomly picked bunch of citizens, but an articulately handpicked mix of religious figures and rigid military styled disciplinarians. And even the judge himself was not a judicial figure but Pastor John George himself. Before Elisha had time to get over her shock of the presiding figures in the court, the first accused was brought in.

The first offender was a middle aged clerk at a stock broking company. He was unmarried and had no immediate family. He claimed to feel lonely and he was heavily disliked in his work place and hence is outcast. Nobody acted like he even existed and he had decided now was the time to finish his existence. Therefore he opted to poison himself. But the dosage of poison was not enough to finish him off and the doctors at the government hospital had managed to cure him. They suspected that he had not actually drunk enough poison to kill himself, maybe out of hesitance to take his life. The clerk pleaded guilty of all charges and was sentenced ten years in the newly created suicide offenders’ jailhouse, being run by the local church.

The second offender was a college student studying in one of the most reputed colleges of the district. This particular academy was run like a boarding school and was famous for its tough disciplining. The student claimed that he felt suffocated under the many rules of the institution and had opted to jump off his dorm room window but instead of losing his life, had just broken a leg due to a softer landing than expected. His luck ended in the courthouse when he was sentenced to fifteen years in the same suicide offenders’ jail, despite his repeated protest that he wanted to continue his education and his survival had given him perspective on what is important in life.

The third offender was a 25 year old man, who was under heavy financial stress of having to support his family of 7 members after his father’s untimely death. No longer able to cope with the pressure of paying back a brutal bank loan and keeping up with bills and feeding his family, he decided to stab himself. The court decided that he was to be taught the value of life and money, by imposing a fine of $25,000 on him and was released without jail time as his family needed him. But how, Elisha wondered would a financially suffering man cope with another debt?

The fourth offender was a scientist working in the field of alchemy. He believed he had found an elixir which would restart his heart even after it stops once it’s administered within 30 minutes of his death. So he had opted to poison himself to test out his new development. He had done it for the sake of humanity and scientific discovery. But whether the elixir worked or not, we do not know, as the suicide task force reached him just as he took the poison and was taken to a hospital where the poison was removed from his body. This scientists’ academic institution was shut down, seen as dangerous to the society and all his assets were sentenced to be taken to SRPA as a punishment for his lack of value towards life.

At this point, her conscience nor her subject experience would allow her to remain silent. She had just been taken to her undergraduate sociology class where she had first caught interest in suicide. She was taken back in fact to the classical age where Emile Durkheim had first categorized suicide into four types. The four cases that she had just seen, bizarrely each fit into one of Durkheim’s types of suicide. It was like her professional area of expertise was slapping her on the face for foregoing it, for forgetting that suicide was a sociological issue and not a criminal offense, for forgetting that society had as much a role to play in suicide as the individual.

Elisha got up from her seat and addressed the court loudly, ‘I am sorry for the interruption, your honor. But this whole court and this procedure and the concept of criminalizing suicide is absolutely ridiculous. I have worked in your task force, I have tried to make sense of this absurdity, but it makes no sense. A man chose to take his life because he was knee deep in debt and you chose to sentence him to more debt. You just gave a legal order to destroy the life of an academician for an experiment gone wrong. Your honour, none of these new regulations are for the sake of the people. None of this is humane and would not emancipate the woes and the agony of the masses. You hide behind your dedication and devotion, but all you are doing is carrying out your zealous misguided religious agenda. It is time you religious men realized that suicide victims are not sinners. It is time you military men realized that suicide victims are not cowards. They are simply people who need our help and we as a society have failed them. And instead of doing right by them, we are throwing them in jail? Where is your humanity and social responsibility? I know suicide hotlines and action based social welfare groups have failed before but that is the only way we can help these people. We just need to put more time and effort in it. And more than that, academicians like myself should realize our duty is not to sit behind our sociological books, but our duty is to be out there, in the field helping people that need us. And I would do it, your honour. Give me the opportunity and I would bring my sociological expertise and work with my fellow experts to bring about social action that could and would not just curb suicide but kill the reasons for which people opt for suicide. And I say this to my fellow sociologist, our academic responsibility does not end with our books, it is to better this society, to revolutionize and aid humanity,’

Elisha’s speech was met with a loud chatter of applause from the assembled crowd in the courthouse. The Judge was left speechless and after a moment of quick conference with the jury, he decided that the verdicts would be suspended indefinitely. In the meantime, Elisha was told that she would be allowed to propose her suggestions to the parliament and reform these suicide laws.

She knew it would be hard work but she was ready. She knew she had to face not just conservatives and religious men, but also hard core politicians to get her views forward. And that was just one battle. If she managed to get appropriate reforms passed, she still had a war to wage, a revolution against the misery of men, women and children that causes them to take their lives. But she was ready. After all, it was her social and academic responsibility.

Note: The four offenders symbolize Emile Durkheim's typology of suicide.