NEW DELHI: Suicide may be a crime in law but the jury is still out on the question of punishment for those who survive the attempt. A bid to take one’s own life attracts a jail term of up to one year, but a number of experts feel this amounts to punishing the victim.

Now a trial court in Delhi has said that a person who attempts to commit suicide due to “penury and destitution” should not be further punished with a prison sentence and waived the jail term in one such case.

Hearing the case of a man who tried to kill himself by consuming sedatives, the court convicted him for the offence but let him off after detaining him in the courtroom for a day. Additional sessions judge Ramesh Kumar also acquitted him of the charge of trying to kill his wife and five daughters due to poverty and helplessness by giving them a cola laced with sedatives, after the victims did not depose against him.

“Attempts to commit suicide are made due to extreme poverty and helplessness. There is no justification for imposing severe punishment upon such convicts,” said Kumar while sentencing Satish Jain, a resident of northwest Delhi, to “imprisonment till the rising of the court”. Jain had pleaded guilty of attempting to commit suicide out of penury.

“A case like the present one in which the accused attempted to commit suicide due to poverty, helplessness and other pressing circumstances should be viewed liberally and lesser sentence should be awarded to them,” additional sessions judge Ramesh Kumar said.

The court noted that Satish Jain had taken the drastic step because he was finding it difficult to support his family comprising his wife and five daughters. He had also undergone a heart bypass surgery.

Jain was acquitted of the charge of attempting to murder his wife and daughters aged between 6 and 16. The prosecution case was that on March 17, 2011, Jain had given soft drinks laced with Diazepam to his wife and daughters with an intention to murder them. He also consumed the drink himself.

The family of seven was found unconscious when a friend of one of the girls visited the house and found it locked from inside, after which the police was alerted.

His wife and daughters told the court that they had purchased cola from the market. Kumar noted that Jain’s wife and daughters were the material witnesses but had not deposed “a single word against him”.

Times View

TOI has consistently maintained that punishing someone driven to the limits of despair, so much so that he attempts to kill himself, makes no sense. We are happy that this court has taken a similar view. However, this is an issue that must not be left to the views of specific judges or courts. The legislature needs to see the logic behind decriminalising attempted suicide and amend the laws suitably. What a person in such a situation needs is sympathy and help in the form of counselling and perhaps medication for depression. Society would be better served and suicides hopefully reduced if the authorities were to take concrete action to increase the number of medical health professionals and to make their services available to those most in need.