Dibs - what greater punishment can you give a person once they're dead? Affecting their estate will punish their family, not them. What can you do? And the justice system serves to do more than just punish - it has 3 goals: rehabilitation, safety of the public, and punishment. How can you rehabilitate somebody who is dead? How can a dead person pose a threat to the public? How can you punish somebody who is dead without also punishing people who did absolutely nothing wrong? I really hope that you're arguing just for the hell of arguing and that you don't actually believe that we should be bringing dead bodies up on suicide charges...

I personally can not believe he actually argued it. I was being facetious, trying to be funny. Oh how wrong I was..

who would believe that the god argument i was drawn into wasn't the worst one presented, so thank you for that, dibs..

how is it determined that the dead person was the one that committed the crime and no punishment is needed? you feel that deterence isn't one of the goals of the justice system? why bother with punishing people if the goal isn't to deter people from committing the crime?

If there is evidence that the person who killed themselves was assisted in any way then charges should certainly be drawn up for those individuals as well, but that has no bearing on whether or not you "punish" the dead individual. And I was referencing the goals of the justice system as they apply to an individual after they had committed a crime. Deterence is certainly a goal of the justice system, but it does not apply to this discussion.