Nurse on receiving end of prank commits suicide

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I don't want to play devil's advocate but it's also enough to lose a job and be seriously humiliated (branded as the naive person who also divulges confidential information and can't be trusted). Revealing confidential medical information to someone pretending to be family is quite a serious matter, and all the more stink if it's a VIP. At the same time, do you really ask VIPs to prove their identity if they call you the worker like normal people? What if you say, "oh really, I don't believe you," but it turns out it really was the queen?

I tend to agree, although I'm also inclined to think that a serious degree of humiliation and career wrecking should be expected when tricking a medical employee into divulging confidential information about a VIP. Disciplinary dismissal, charges before a professional body, perhaps criminal charges for the employees, should be foreseeable, although I suppose someone more entertainment-minded could be oblivious to this. Still, it could easily wreck someone's life, and some people react by suicide.

But attributing the suicide to the DJs here would be another sign of declining standards in law education or perhaps declining intelligence in the law industry. Failing to understand mens rea is a worldwide problem of lawyers and a growing one (British legal system being one of those which subvert mens rea in definitions of some statutory crimes for example, with courts playing along). I tend to link it to a decline in both intelligence and ethics. If ethics are gradually rejected or reduced to only what the law covers, the effect (basically close to legal nihilism, although I'm not throwing this label on those British prosecutors who are still only investigating and not yet pressing the charges) can be that adequate causation links go out the window, among other things. Legal responsibility needs to be narrower than moral responsibility and it's preposterous to attach legal responsibility where moral responsibility is dubious, remote, close to nil.