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Prediction: after the singularity, “Schreiber vs. Iowa” is going to be cited by prosecutors arguing that debts & criminal records do not disappear simply because an individual has transitioned from flesh & blood to cyborg.
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So he was merely dead, but not really most sincerely dead.
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Sooo, technically dead, like technically correct is the best kind? Or not, if you’re serving a whole life term. Confusing.
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It he coded and he was pronounced, then, as a matter of common sense, it seems to me he should be released. His natural life ended, and now he’s on bonus time.
Right, and since there isn’t, his argument fails multiple times, including right at the start.
His problem is he’s never been anything but technically alive.
Then they would have buried or cremated him, and this court case wouldn’t exist. But that didn’t happen, because at worst he was unconscious, not dead. One does not “get better” from death, by definition; they don’t pronounce you dead unless all efforts to revive you have failed, and a sufficient length of time has elapsed that the brain is beyond recovery. (There are a few cases of people pronounced dead who turned out to be alive - because they were misdiagnosed. They had been alive the whole time, but their hearts were beating so weakly, life simply wasn’t detected. A misdiagnosis holds no legal weight, in the same way that misidentifying someone as a dog based on their ability to bark legally does not make them a dog.)
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I for one am very, very glad that we don’t have a legal definition of death. Or life, for that matter. At some point in the future we’re probably going to have to grapple with the implication of some sunset of: vitrification, cryonics, mind uploading, backup copies, whole body transplants.
Depending on advances in physics we may also someday need a legal solution to Parfit’s teleportation “paradox” and the implications for identity of the fact that identical particles are fundamentally indistinguishable.
What “legally dead” means is case-specific.The interesting question is whether this guy would have satisfied the mandated tests following an execution in that facility. This has little to do with our common-sense understanding of what an actual life, or lifespan is, or what constitutes true biological death.
This has to do with whether our justice system observes its proper obligations. In this case, you have inmate who contracted a fatal medical condition while under state care. (fatal sepsis, btw, raises the question of whether his medical care was substandard). He then “died”, and required resuscitation. If his symptoms when he “died” satisfy that institution’s definition of “death”, then did he not legally die? If so, the question is whether the resuscitation can be viewed as cruel and unusual behavior.
Exactly how often should we allow the State to let prisoners die and then resuscitate them only to continue their punishment, when their sentence only demands they be incarcerated until they die? At what point - if any - does this become cruel and unusual punishment?
But no, he didn’t. Heart stoppage isn’t “death” any more than stopping breathing is death. (“Legally dead” may be case specific but it never applies to someone whose heart briefly stopped.) People mistakenly talk about heart stoppage being death, but there’s no definition of death (and certainly not the legal/medical ones) where that’s the case. The “death” part - legally and medically - is when you can’t resuscitate the person. Ever. One is never resuscitated from death. That idea is, by definition, nonsense. If it’s possible to resuscitate someone, they are not - and never were - dead.
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I mean it probably wasn’t going to work, but worth a shot.
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