Who is responsible for a suicide? The crude answer is: the person who takes their own life. It’s the ultimate act of autonomy. But clearly it’s not that simple.

Many people are pushed into suicide through circumstances that aren’t of their own making. Think of concentration camp prisoners who threw themselves against the electric fences at Auschwitz and the people who jumped from the Twin Towers. The same is true of someone so badly injured through his employer’s negligence that he sinks into a deep depressive illness and kills himself. In such a case, Corr v IBC Vehicles Ltd, the House of Lords has now engineered the law to follow good sense and good science and let a widow claim damages for her husband’s suicide.

Historically, in law, a suicide that followed from an employer’s unlawful lack of care was regarded as a novus actus interveniens (a new intervening act). It was seen as a break in the chain of causation that was begun with the employer’s fault.

The novus actus principle has been applied for years in physical injury cases. In a case in 1969, for example, Abraham McKew from Glasgow was injured at work. His left leg was weakened. But some days later, at the top of steep stairs with no hand rail, his leg “went” and rather than fall he jumped, suffering much more serious injury. His decision to climb steep stairs and then jump when in danger was regarded as a novus actus interveniens, and so his employer didn’t have to pay compensation for the second, aggravated injury.

But, unlike Mr McKew’s conscious decision to jump, suicides can be triggered by mental states into which people have involuntarily been put by an employer’s negligence.

In the recent case, the House of Lords decided that Eileen Corr was entitled to damages for her husband’s suicide where that had been the direct result of a depressive illness from which he’d suffered as the foreseeable consequence of an accident for which his employer was to blame.

Thomas Corr had suffered a serious accident at work, which IBC Vehicles Ltd, his employer, admitted had been caused by its breach of duty. In a horrific incident, his ear and part of his head had been ripped away when a machine swung a large metal panel at his head. His injuries required long and painful surgery. He suffered persistently from severe headaches, unsteadiness and other conditions. As a result of the accident, he became severely depressed, a condition that worsened over time. He committed suicide by jumping from the top of a multi-storey car park.

Mrs Corr claimed to recover the financial loss attributable to Mr Corr’s suicide. Under the Fatal Accidents Act 1976, the question was whether his death had been caused by a wrongful act, namely IBC’s breach of duty.

The company argued, among other things, that Mr Corr’s suicide hadn’t been caused by them. It wasn’t “reasonably foreseeable”, and that it had broken the chain of causation and constituted a novus actus interveniens.

The company argued it wasn’t responsible for what Mr Corr did to himself. Lord Bingham disagreed. He noted that while the law didn’t generally treat us as “our brother’s keeper”, Mr Corr had acted in a way which he would not have done “but for the injury from which the employer’s breach caused him to suffer”. The novus actus principle is based on fairness: it isn’t fair to make someone liable for something that wasn’t their fault. But if someone kills himself as a result of an illness that was the fault of an employer, then it isn’t unfair to ask the employer to pay compensation.

Two main reasons lay behind the modern law’s attitude to allowing damages for someone like Ms Corr.

First, such compensation doesn’t today involve her benefiting from a crime. Suicide used to be a crime (the punishment was that the suicide’s property was forfeit to the Crown) and was only criminally declassified in 1961. In earlier eras, therefore, courts were indisposed to grant someone like Ms Corr damages, as she would have been gaining money through her husband’s crime. But, as suicide is not now criminal, there’s no way someone like Mrs Corr can be seen as being rewarded for a crime.

Second, whereas suicide used to be seen as an individual’s free choice, modern psychiatry has shown that it can result from some mental conditions in a way that make it silly to describe it as just the free exercise of an option. Bingham noted that Mr Corr’s suicide was not a “voluntary, informed decision” taken by him as “an adult of sound mind” but a decision taken in a severe mental illness that was his employer’s fault. The current clinical data show that between one in ten and one in six persons suffering from clinical depression will commit suicide.

The House of Lords decision in Corr v IBC Vehicles is an excellent example of law being adapted to the modern world.

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University

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