So this guy, “Jay Seuss,” is sentenced to death in a U.S. court for sedition and treason. He is given a single penalty of death, no additional sentences. He exhausts all his appeals and is finally executed by lethal injection on a Friday afternoon. His death is witnessed by several people, including the warden and prosecuting attorney. The attending medical doctor declares him dead. The state declares itself satisfied that the penalty has been carried out. Jay’s body is released to his family. A family friend arranges to have the body transported to a funeral home and then buried in a tomb that same day. Everybody goes home for the weekend.
Sunday morning there are reports of a disturbance at the graveyard. The police go to investigate and find that the tomb of Jay Seuss has been opened and the tomb is empty. Fearing that a crime has been committed, they go to the home of Jay’s relatives as part of their investigation only to find a very alive and well Jay Seuss. They promptly arrest him.
While Jay sits in jail, his case wends its way through the court system. It finally reaches the Supreme Court. Jay’s defense attorney is arguing that since Jay was duly executed, his death witnessed by the state representatives, and the declaration of death was fully accepted by the state, that Jay’s sentence of death has been completely carried out and that Jay is now a free man.
The state is arguing that since Jay is obviously very much alive, however improbably, that the execution, despite all the witnesses, has not been carried out and Jay should be put to death for sure this time.
So dopers, what will SCOTUS do? What kind of questions will they ask the opposing attorneys? And what will be their decision?
I don’t know, but I’d guess that a court would have to decide if a legal definition of death meant (a) “dead permanently and not coming back”, in which case they’d have to go through whatever motions they normally go through when they accidentally declare someone dead (normally with much less convincing evidence) and then be free to re-carry out the sentence or (b) accepted that someone could die multiple times, in which case I suppose the “sentence already carried out” argument could fly.
But I expect that if they’re not convinced he’s Jesus they’ll vote for the “really weird mistake” option and vote for (a). And if they ARE this will be the least of the constitutional problems.
Or I suppose they could simply nail him up in a coffin and bury him. After all, he died
There’s your first problem. Jay Seuss is legally dead. Can they arrest a dead person?
The big thing is, if people can come back to life after they have died, it can cause all sorts of legal problems. For example, if John Marshall came back to life, would John Roberts be out of a job? If Queen Victoria came back to life, would her great-great-granddaughter go back to being the heir presumptive to the British throne? If Jay Seuss can come back to life, perhaps anyone can.
Of course they can. If I stage my own death and flee the country and am pronounced dead a few years later only to return and go on a killing spree, they wouldn’t be magically bound from arresting me because I’m legally dead.
“We can’t put the cuffs on him, sir! He’s DEAD!”
Anyway, if they try to execute me a few times and they repeatedly botch it, can’t my attorney try to argue that it’s cruel and unusual punishment and possibly get me off? I’m pretty sure Jay would get off. Considering the supernatural doesn’t exist, there’d have to be a reason that he managed to survive. If there isn’t one, the premise is a broken one. A.) There’d be mass religious hysteria or B.) The government would promptly steal away Jay in the night for scientific study and silence his family.
The NRA petition to SCOTUS on the grounds that lethal injection is simultaneously “cruel and unusual” and a lily-livered librull failure and proposes that a firing squad is the only appropriate means of state sponsored execution.
I think at least with the Roberts court, it would narrowly limit the decision as to whether or not Jay died. The broader questions as to what constitutes death, or can a person resurrect after death, would probably be left to some other appeal.
Most likely congress would immediately come up with a law defining death that would probably include something like “cells in the body cannot divide or grow, even after an extended period of quiescence.”
But that’s not what the court is being asked to decide. They’re being asked to decide whether or not Jay was actually executed, and, having completed his sentence, is now free.
In all seriousness, Seuss could file a habeas corpus petition arguing that he cannot be sent to the needle again because he was already executed. As a threshold question, the burden of proof would be on him to convince a court that he in fact died and came back, as opposed to simply having been mistakenly declared dead at the time of the procedure.
Depending on how it rules on that question, the court would have to decide either (a) can a man who died and came back be executed again, or (b) can a man who was mistakenly declared dead be executed again? The answer to (b) is almost certainly yes, but as to (a), it’s harder to say. The court might simply analogize to cases where a first execution attempt failed, in which case the analysis collapses into (b). That would be consistent with the purpose of a sentence of execution.
Personally, I think there’s no possibility that a court would find that he was actually resurrected. That may be fighting the hypothetical for purposes of this thread, however, and if so, I apologize.
That’s probably the most likely scenario. Absent any scientific evidence that a person can die and be resurrected (the current medical boundary for folks making end-of-life decisions is the cessation of brainwave functions), the courts may just determine that Jay has indeed not “died” and therefore the state shall be allowed to complete the sentence of execution.
An interesting question arises when our technology advances so far that “death” becomes a meaningless term. What happens when someone’s brain is backed up, they are executed, their body cremated, but then someone regrows a new body from a DNA record, then dumps the backup into the new brain? From an objective standpoint, this is a different person, even if it’s a perfect copy of the original. From an ethical standpoint, this villainous person is alive again, ready to do harm. I’m guessing that congress/the various states would make laws that all copies of DNA and memories, in addition to the original body, shall be destroyed for a sentence of death.
