Talk:Presumption of Death

Redirect from “death in absentia.”[edit]

There is no such thing as “death in absentia.” The term “death in absentia” is completely bogus. In the USA, for example, there is not a single reported case in any state that uses the phrase “death in absentia” or “dead in absentia” in this sense. (There are cases where a person was sentenced to “death in absentia,” but that is not the same thing.) More to the point, there is not a single citation in this article that includes either phrase. The term has no conventional existence outside of this article, articles based on it, and the 2011 low-budget horror film "Absentia" (a film about trolls) which is probably also influenced by this article. Apparently someone just made it up and put it on Wikipedia. In any event, there is no reliable source to show any acceptance of such a phrase. No one contests this. Thus presumption of death will have to do.

There is another problem, however. There is an important difference between "presumption of death" and a "declaration of death issued by a court. The presumption of death is an evidentiary device that allows a court to accept a persons death as proven if certain other facts are proven (e.g., inexplicable absence for seven years). A declaration of death may result from such a presumption. However, a court may declare a person dead even without a any legal presumption being used. Thus if 20 men working at a chemical plant testify that they saw a coworker fall into a giant vat of acid an dissolve into nothing before their very eyes, a court may declare the fallen person dead, but no presumption necessary to do so--20 people watched the man die and the death is proven directly by their testimony. There is some good reason to think a "Declaration of death" article should encompass the presumption of death as a subset thereof. (If you look at the article as is you can see that it is almost that already.) Any ideas?

There is a profound dearth of proper sources. This must be tackled with proper dispatch.

Criticality (talk) 17:24, 6 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting. I've never thought about this before, and just landed here because this article landed in category:Missing redirects. Certainly need to avoid confusing people declared dead because they disappeared with people sentenced to death who didn't attend their trial. See Category:People sentenced to death in absentia. From this, I don't believe that "the term “death in absentia” is completely bogus". I would expect that a category with 129 articles in it would have a {{catmain}} article... where is it? – Wbm1058 (talk) 17:08, 10 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

See Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2010 July 30#Category:Declared dead. Not sure I see anything inherently wrong with Category:People declared dead in absentia. Perhaps this should have been taken to WP:Categories for discussion rather than implemented boldly. But I agree that Category:Missing people declared dead is plainer English.

These seem to be synonyms, as a missing person is indeed "away or absent". It could be a lot of work to change the category title to use a better synonym if the category has a lot of member articles.

The problem with Death in absentia is that it is ambiguous. It could mean either:

Sentenced to death in absentia, or
Declared death in absentia – Wbm1058 (talk) 19:07, 10 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Here is a "proper source" using the phrase "someone has been declared dead in absentia". Brenda Heist: How to come back from the dead (BBC News). I'm sure others can be found. – Wbm1058 (talk) 19:15, 10 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@Criticality: I'm reverting your copy-paste rename (Cut and paste move) of the article title. Not so much because I disagree with your assessment of the merits of "Presumption of death" so much as I don't see the basis for making the title a proper name. Wikipedia's style is to use sentence case for titles. It's bad enough that we already have had one WP:Content fork of this article, and by copying here to the proper name title, you've created a second fork. If this truly is the correct title, then the entire page history can be moved here, overwriting this page's insignificant history. See WP:Moving a page. Wbm1058 (talk) 01:03, 11 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

See Talk:In absentia#Proposed Merger with Trial (law), which supports my contention that wikt:in absentia is just a fancy dictionary word. I think In absentia should be a disambiguation page. Wbm1058 (talk) 02:23, 11 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the other problem you mention above: as you say, presumption of death is also ambiguous to some extent. Legal presumption of death perhaps unambiguously says that a court has made it official, and may be another acceptable way of saying declared death in absentia. But there can be a simple presumption of death when someone is missing seven days after their boat capsized. It just may take seven years to make it a Legal presumption of death. Wbm1058 (talk) 12:54, 12 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Death in absentia is now a disambiguation page. Wbm1058 (talk) 03:18, 15 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]