User:LukeSurl/civildeathdraft

Civil death (civiliter mortuus) is the loss of all or almost all civil rights by a person due to a conviction for a felony or due to an act by the government of a country that results in the loss of civil rights. The term is usually used to describe punishments that strip a person of legal rights, allowing harm to be inflicted on them with impunity, though it may also describe the lack of legal rights of slaves. Neither practice is legal in any modern day jurisdiction. Modern practices (such as the disenfranchisement of those declared mentally incompetent by a court or felony disenfranchisement ) have be likened to the historical practice of civil death as a way of emphasizing their severity.

Historical practices
In medieval Europe, felons lost all civil rights upon their conviction. This civil death often led to actual death, since anyone could kill and injure a felon with impunity. Under the Holy Roman Empire, a person declared civilly dead was referred to as vogelfrei, ‘free as a bird’, and could even be killed since they were completely outside the law. In slaving jurisdictions such as ancient Rome slaves were effectively civilly dead, being mere possessions of their owners with no legal personhood.

Historically outlawry, that is, declaring a person as an outlaw, was a common form of civil death.

In modern times such practices would contravene international agreements on the abolition of slavery and conventions of human rights, such as Article 6 of the European Convention. In modern times, no country's legal system explicitly uses civil death as a legal punishment. However critics of felony disenfranchisement and other collateral consequences of criminal conviction have likened such practices to civil death.