Template:Cite court/testcases

Example article
Encouraging a suicide—without necessarily aiding it—happens in a variety of contexts. A number of online communities engage in suicide advocacy, including encouraging individual members to kill themselves, and the phenomenon of suicide baiting occurs both online and in public spaces, for instance when people attempt to jump to their deaths. In many online communities, phrases such as "kill yourself" (often abbreviated "KYS") are commonplace, although such exhortations are often not meant as sincere incitement.

Legality
Incitement to suicide is illegal in TK of 192 countries surveyed by Brian L. Mishara and David N. Weisstub in 2015.

Australia
There is no law against it at a federal level in Australia, but relevant laws exist four states or territories.

United States
Assisting a suicide is a crime in most states, although rarely if ever considered murder as it once was. , twelve states make "causing suicide" in one form or another a kind of homicide, either as murder, manslaughter, or either; these offenses tend to overlap with existing homicide statutes. Most states instead have distinct offenses for participation in a suicide. Eleven predicate those laws on physical involvement or overcoming the victim's will. Thirteen states criminalize intentionally aiding a suicide, without specifying whether physical participating is required. Ten criminalize incitement to suicide even where no physical assistance has been provided.

Binder and Chiesa find no case where someone was convicted of incitement without some physical aspect. With the exception of the Mississippi Supreme Court in Williams v. State (2010), courts have been reluctant to apply such broad interpretations, even when allowed by the plain-text meaning of the statute. For instance, in In Re Ryan N. (2001) the California Court of Appeals held that "mere verbal solicitation", even if encompassed by the relevant statute's literal meaning, did not create the necessary actus reus for a conviction. In People v. Campbell (1983), the Michigan Court of Appeals quashed common law murder charges against a man who encouraged his wife's lover's talk of suicide and then gave him a gun and bullets. The court found that roughly a third of states criminalized such incitement, but that none treated it as murder, and furthermore found it "not clear that incitement to suicide was ever considered murder at the common law".

State v. Melchert-Dinkel (2014)
William Francis Melchert-Dinkel, a licensed practical nurse from Faribault, Minnesota, claimed in a number of online interactions to be a suicidal female registered nurse and offered assistance to people seeking to commit suicide. He falsely offered to engage in suicide pacts with his correspondents, and provided one of them, Mark Drybrough, with step-by-step instructions on how to hang himself. Drybrough hanged himself in 2005. After the suicide of Nadia Kajouji in 2008, police found her correspondence with Melchert-Dinkel, which led to his arrest and indictment for "two counts of advising and encouraging suicide in violation of Minnesota Statutes section 609.215". He was convicted on both counts, and the conviction was affirmed by the Minnesota Court of Appeals.

On appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court, Melchert-Dinkel sought to have § 609.215 struck down as a violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, including in its criminalization of "assist[ing]" suicide. The court considered three arguments by the state under which Melchert-Dinkel's speech might not be protected: That it was speech integral to criminal conduct, that it was incitement, and that it involved "deceit, fraud, and lies". The court rejected the first two arguments since suicide is not a crime in Minnesota. Regarding the third, it looked to United States v. Alvarez, in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that "speech is not unprotected simply because the speaker knows that he or she is lying", and concluded that since Melchert-Dinkel gained no material advantage from his lies, they were not fraud and were thus protected under Alvarez. It severed the words "advises" and "encourages" from the statute, while leaving in place the offense of "assist[ing] another in taking the other's own life".

On remand, Melchert-Dinkel was convicted under the remaining portion of the statute, for assisting Drybrough by providing the instructions on hanging himself and for attempting to assist Kajouji by providing instructions that she ultimately did not use. He received a five-year sentence, with the first 178 days to be served in jail, as well as ten years' probation. Subsequent to his release from jail, the Minnesota Court of Appeals overturned his conviction for attempt to assist in Kajouji's suicide, but upheld his conviction for assisting in Drybrough's.