Is assault resulting in PTSD considered as causing serious harm? Is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (or Complex PTSD) treated as an injury, serious injury or life-changing injury in cases of assault ? I am interested in answers from any jurisdiction. In response to a comment : I am interested in whether or not, or to what extent, the effect of PTSD can be included as an injury due to the assault, not if it would be an additional charge (although if that's the case anywhere I'd like to know). I am primarily interested in criminal law, although points of note in civil law would be of interest as well. Motivation I'm trying to gather information on how PTSD/C-PTSD is viewed in terms of injury to a victim in different jurisdictions. From my perspective causing PTSD/C-PTSD is equivalent to causing a permanent disability. Many years ago I was a victim of an assault and break-in which resulted in (thankfully) minor physical injuries but caused severe Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD). PTSD and C-PTSD are life changing disorders which have an impact similar to a severe disability in many ways. In Ireland they're treated as a disability for the purposes of Welfare allowance. However the court case, long past, did not mention my C-PTSD and while there was a guilty verdict, it is clear that, in my case, PTSD was not considered as equivalent to e.g. the effect of gross bodily harm or causing a disability to the victim. My C-PTSD was diagnosed long before the court case and within a month of the assault. There would have been ample time to list it as a result of the assault on e.g. a formal charge document. I'm Irish and the assault I describe happened in Ireland, so a similar legal system to the UK. I am, however, interested in how this is treated in jurisdictions.
france Yes, both for civil and criminal law, but in different ways. The general principle of civil law in France (and I believe every civil-legal-system jurisdiction) is that one is liable for any damage they cause through fault. Of course, details differ greatly between what is considered a damage, what are the standards to prove causation or fault, etc. Cour de cassation, civile, Chambre civile 2, 18 janvier 2018, 16-28.392 specifically endorsed a lower court reasoning that distinguished between préjudice moral (moral damage) and préjudice psychologique (psychological damage). The latter is about quantifiable medical damage (even if mental rather than physical), while the former covers grave breaches of wellbeing. In the case at hand, a couple was assassinated when their child was two years old; the child later developed severe psychic disorders as a result of the trauma; it was found that a compensation for the préjudice moral of losing his parents at a young age did not foreclose a later suit for the préjudice psychologique of developing mental troubles (which became visible much later in his life). To be honest, I would be extremely surprised if any jurisdiction recognized no cause of action for any type of psychological damage. There might be issues of burden of proof etc. such that in practice suing for psychological damage is unviable, but a complete bar on any civil action predicated on psychic damage seems unthinkable. Regarding criminal law, many assault-type crimes are scaled by gravity. That gravity is evaluated by days of &quot;complete inability to work&quot; (search incapacité totale de travail through that section of the penal code). While the notion has been standardized by work law cases, it also applies outside a work context when the damage prevents one from doing basic life actions (children, retirees or the unemployed can be subject to a &quot;complete inability to work&quot;). Whether the damage that caused it was physical or mental is irrelevant. Two notes though: physical damage resulting from assault is more easily quantified by that scale than mental damage. If a mob boss breaks your bones, you spend one month in the hospital, and then you get out roughly healed; it’s easy to say that it cost you one month of your life. If the same mob boss kills your wife in a gruesome manner, you might be haunted for life, but still be able to work, feed yourself etc., past one or two days of shock. &quot;Low-level&quot;, long-lasting damage is not well-measured that way. quantifying the duration of a &quot;complete inability to work&quot; depends on the victim’s active cooperation with the prosecution (such as going to see a doctor to get a certificate). That is possible because the civil and criminal causes of actions are usually joined in a single trial, during which the victim will try to prove injury. (It is possible for the victim to open a separate civil trial, but that’s usually not a good idea. The same exact remedies are available by joining in the criminal trial; usually the prosecutor has the same goals as you in proving the facts, so why not let them do it and save some lawyer fees?) It would probably not be reasonable in a common-law system with separate trials. It also breaks down in certain cases (e.g.: in a good fraction of spousal abuse cases, the victim refuses to testify against the accused).
There is pretty much never a right to retaliate against harm to oneself, even blatantly unlawful harm. There is a right to defend oneself and others. One can use force to stop someone from inflicting unlawful or unjustified harm, or to prevent someone from inflicting such harm when the harm is imminent. One is not permitted to use more force than is "reasonably required" under the actual circumstances. This is true in pretty much every jurisdiction that i know of. The details on how much force will be considered "reasonable" will vary. In some jurisdictions there is, under some circumstances, a s"duty to retreat". This generally means that if a person attacked can avoid the harm by fleeing with reasonable safety, that person must do so rather than using force in self-defense. In some jurisdictions this "duty to retreat" applies id the victim is attacked in public, but not in the victim's own home. The right to self defense does not apply when the "attacker" is an agent of the state acting lawfully. For example, a prison guard taking a condemned prisoner to a death sentence cannot be attacked on the grounds that the prisoner is engaging in self defense. In theory a police officer engaging an excessive force, particularly unjustified deadly force, may be resisted in self-defense. But courts are quite reluctant to find such resistance justified in practice. There generally must be very clear evidence of egregious misconduct for the court to rule for the non-police person in such a case. Note that "self" defense can equally be defense of another person. Pretty much all the same rules apply. Self defense applies no matter who the attacker is, but that force is reasonable may vary depending on the attacker. Only such force as is reasonably required to stop or prevent the harm may be used with a justification of self-defense.
Specifically, the threatened action is about stalking and implicit threats to his family. I'm not suggesting that there is a lot of merit to the claim, but that is how he is presenting the argument. The question would be where there is an intentional, repeated following of a person for the purpose of harassing the person with express or implied threats of violence or death. The jury would have to decide whether the implicit threat is credible (somebody plans to blow him or his family out of the sky), a decision would probably turn on the number of death threats he receives.
Your question is about "Would it be kidnapping if I was injured and someone took me to a hospital without my consent", so I don't understand these other answers which say "it depends on the situation". The key point is what you mean by "without my consent". Good Samaritan laws are also relevant, which offer defenses to people who do things that would otherwise be unlawful when they are doing it with good intentions to help someone who they believe is injured or would become injured without their intervention. The main things to consider are the degree of injury, which is a spectrum ranging from no injury at all to being dead, and whether the injured person is conscious. Are you so injured that you are unconscious? In most jurisdictions, being unconscious is considered as you consenting to any actions which are done with the intent of giving you medical assistance, which is on a spectrum of saying "hey are you ok?" or shaking you in order to wake you up, all the way up to treatment including major surgery. So by being unconscious it is usually automatically consent, but if you are awake and are refusing help or treatment, even if you could die if you didn't receive treatment, it would be easy to argue that you were not consenting and that any treatment/assistance etc was unlawful. This situation sometimes happens, and EMTs are often trained to wait until the person goes unconscious to then give them medical assistance/transport etc, but assisting someone before they go unconscious could still be argued as permissible, if the injured person was so distressed that they were unable to give/refuse consent, or at least if the assistor believed that to be the case. This is why if someone has a major medical problem and is unconscious, hospitals can resuscitate them and even perform surgery without them signing a consent form. By being unconscious, it is considered that they are consenting to any necessary surgery to help them, even including amputation or other negative consequences. Conversely, if someone has a valid Advance healthcare directive on file which forbids measures such as resuscitation, they will be considered not to consent, and will usually be left alone without life-saving assistance. Resuscitating/performing surgery on someone in this case can be cause for damages to the injured person, because it would have been clear that they did not consent to such assistance.
In England and Wales, under section 2 of the Suicide Act 1961 (as amended by section 59 and Schedule 12 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009) it's a criminal offence to do an act capable of encouraging or assisting someone to commit suicide. I think that applies to Scotland too, and there is similar law in Northern Ireland. Encouraging suicide is also a criminal offence in some other common law jurisdictions, e.g. in Australia. While in other common law jurisdictions, if there isn't such a law, the person might instead be prosecuted for manslaughter - or not at all. The minimum, maximum and recommended penalties may well differ between jurisdictions. I don't know what you mean by "vengeance rampage" but I'm not aware of any jurisdictions where it is lawful for a person to cause harm to someone for revenge. States tend to reserve for themselves a monopoly on the use of force.
The language is worded broader: &quot;A victim of [list of crimes] or that victim's representative shall have the following rights as provided by law:&quot; The list is seemingly alphabetically, and covers besides arson injuring people, also aggravated arson &amp; battery, misuse of explosives, negligent use of a deadly weapon, murder, [two other types of homicide], kidnapping, [various types of sexual misconduct], [two types of hit and run], [two types of child endangerment]. That is a closed list, that gives the victim or his representative (estate or legal guardian) the rights enumerated after.
Even before the police have any idea who did it, Bob is guilty of whatever wrong he did. However, if you want this to be a legal question and not a moral one, we should assume that you really want to know "Can Bob be convicted of murder, if the evidence proves that he did do it?". Yes, he can. See Morris v. State, 214 S.W.3d 159. The critical question was whether the defendant understood the charges (he did) and whether he could assist in his defense (he could). The desideratum of being able to assist in your own defense only goes so far. On the other hand, maybe no, per Wilson v. US. A government expert witness "testified that appellant had permanent retrograde amnesia and would not be able to aid in his own defense in terms of remembering any of the acts alleged in the indictment". The crucial difference seems to be whether one just has loss of memory, vs. loss of memory connected with some other mental disorder. [Addendum] Per Dusky v. United States 362 U.S. 402, competence to stand trial depends on whether the accused has sufficient present ability to consult with his lawyer with a reasonable degree of rational understanding -- and whether he has a rational as well as factual understanding of the proceedings against him. I am not aware of any exceptions e.g. whether this is not the case with strict liability crimes like statutory rape, and since it is generally held that "competency" is a requirement mandated by the due process clause, I don't think there could be an exception.
At least one court has found that unnecessary surgeries are child abuse. Quoting from Is Circumcision Legal? by Peter W Adler (I recommend this article to you, it goes into common law and Constitutional law around surgeries). I think that we should not be distracted by the definition of abuse adopted by the court (risk of death, impairment of function etc) because even with your caveats about wonderful bionic legs, the replacements are not members of the body. Arguably. A 2010 Tex as appellate case, Williamson v. State , confirms that any unnecessary surgery on children constitutes statutory child abuse. The Williamson court held a mother criminally liable for unnecessary surgery that caused serious bodily injury to her son, defined in Texas as “an injury that creates a substantial risk of death or that causes death, serious permanent disfigurement, or protracted loss or impairment of the function of any bodily member or organ.” A physician testified that unnecessary surgery does not constitute reasonable medical care. The court also found a scalpel to meet the definition of a “deadly weapon” as it can cause death or serious bodily injury. Circumcision, whether male or female, is thus criminal child abuse.