From N. Am. Co. for Life & Health Ins. v. Caldwell, decided Thursday by the Eleventh Circuit, in an opinion by Chief Judge William Pryor, joined by Judges Robin Rosenbaum and Stanley Marcus:

This appeal requires us to decide whether a life-insurance policy excludes from coverage a death resulting from suicide-by-cop. North American Company for Life and Health Insurance issued two policies for the life of Justin Caldwell that excluded “suicide” from coverage. According to the insurance company’s complaint, Justin successfully carried out a plan to provoke police officers to shoot and kill him. North American sought a declaratory judgment that it did not owe the policies’ beneficiaries. But the district court ruled that Justin died “as a result of being shot by another person,” not “suicide,” and granted a judgment on the pleadings in favor of the beneficiaries. Because the ordinary meaning of “suicide” includes suicide-by-cop, we vacate and remand….

As far as we can tell, the crux of the beneficiaries’ objection to this conclusion is that Justin took his life indirectly. Under their reasoning, that an officer fired the deadly bullet sufficiently detaches Justin’s death from his intent to die such that his death falls outside the ambit of “suicide.” Indeed, the beneficiaries assert that these events are closer to homicide than suicide. They cite to a Maryland decision that, although not involving a suicide-by-cop, opined about how it should be classified: “[W]hen one incites a police officer to use deadly violence, we are … presented with justifiable homicide, if the officer’s use of deadly force is found to be reasonable …. But [we are not] presented with suicide, for the death occurred at the hands of another.” This dictum anomalously invents a directness requirement for suicide not present anywhere else. After all, if a man threw himself before a train, nobody would argue that the conductor had committed homicide.

There is no material distinction. Police officers are trained to, and have little choice but to, use deadly force to stop a civilian who threatens them, their fellow officers, and the public at large. A civilian, aware of this fact, threatens the officers to provoke this predictable and lethal response in the same way that the man who throws himself before a train anticipates the predictable, lethal outcome of being run over. In both cases, a person intentionally causes his own death, even if an external force delivers the fatal blow. In other words, he commits “suicide.”