X-Message-Number: 5600
From:  (Steven B. Harris/Virginia George )
Newsgroups: sci.cryonics
Subject: Re: Death penalty
Date: 14 Jan 1996 11:50:59 GMT
Message-ID: <4daqn3$>
References: <>

In <>  (Dave
Sill) writes: 
>
>Just curious...no, I'm contemplating killing anyone...
>
>What would happen if someone sentenced to death requested
>cryopreservation? What if they were eventually revived? Seems like
>they'd be scott free, their sentence having been carried out. Or would
>the state argue that a death sentence requires a suredeath?
>
>-- 
>Dave Sill ()             


   That would be a toughie, but not one that people haven't faced
before.  Around the middle of the 18th century when recovery of
clinically dead people from suffocation and drowning was first
demonstrated, people began to wonder about resuscitating people from
hanging.  About this time the law provided that executed men be
dissected, and one of the reasons for this was to make sure of death. 
It was understood that way by families also.  For a long time, the most
heinous of murderers have had their bodies destroyed by the state in
addition to being executed.  The Lincoln conspirators were buried next
to the gallows (dug up later).  L. Czolgosz (assassin of McKinley) was
disolved in acid.  Giteau and Oswald were both autopsied.  The
Nuremburg criminals were cremated, and a US request for their brains
denied....

   There have been lots of movies about reviving executed men by means
of science, and the archetypal result is always that the
executed/revived man comes back as a monster of revenge, usually
killing the jury.  This happens in Karloff's _The Man They Could Not
Hang_ (1939), made by Columbia; and also Karloff's previous picture for
Universal: _Son of Frankenstein_.   Remember that this last is the
movie in which we are introduced to Igor (played by Bela Lugosi).  Igor
is a body-snatcher who has been hanged, and then resuscitated by Dr.
Frankenstein.  The townsmen decide he has been punished enough, and
don't re-hang him.  Igor goes around in this movie not with a
hunchback, but with a contorted neck (from having been broken).  And he
spends the movie getting the monster (with whom he is now sympatico) to
kill off the last of the 8 jurors who had sentenced him to death.  
Agatha Christie's _12 Little Indians_ no doubt owes itself to her
watching of stuff like this as a girl.


                                           Steve Harris, M.D.


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