This paper contributes a design bar for coercion-resistant custody and a construction that meetsit, motivated by a sharp negative result: custody designs that lack such a bar can be worse thanuseless — worse than merely a false sense of security, which would be bad enough — activelyendangering the holder they claim to protect. Physical-coercion ("wrench") attacks defeat custody schemes that key management and cryptographytreat as out of scope. We give a formal model of coercion against a secret-holder and prove that alarge class of "graceful" recovery designs — those that leave a device seizure holding afeasible-but-slower path to the secret — are strictly worse than useless: they manufacture amaterial incentive to assassinate the victim. We name this the Deadly Race, derive it from a singleimpossibility (one cannot prove one has forgotten), and distill a design bar — the No-Gray-AreaCriterion — that any coercion-resistant scheme must clear. We then present a construction — the Time-Gated Perceptual Oracle (TGPO) — that clears the bar forthe Bitcoin self-custody setting while keeping custody individual, and we locate a shippingalternative — timelock-rescue vaults — precisely: it clears the same bar by the other availableroute, at the cost of a trusted third party. We also classify the most widely shipped consumercountermeasure — the self-destruct ("wallet-erase") PIN — and find it clears nothing: the vendor'sown documentation presupposes a surviving backup, so the erasure removes the device path whileleaving intact the path that runs through the holder. The framework fixes a bar; it does not claimTGPO is the unique construction that clears it. Manuscript in preparation; not peer reviewed.