It’s not the skilled doctors, it’s the skilled, motivated, and educated LPNs who will be moving the ‘patient’ to clean all surface, keeping them dry, and inspecting for the presense of bed sores. And, again, let me restate - the infection that killed Christopher Reeves was a complication from bed sores. Even with, presumably, the best care money could buy, and an aware patient to help alert the caregivers to potential hot spots, he still died from a complication of being unable to move his body on it’s own for regular exercise and cleaning.
I don’t see the situation in the OP as anything but putting the condemned convicts onto a ‘death’ lottery to see how many years they can last in a coma. And getting anyone to live even ten years in that state would be a near-miraculous event.
Furthermore, the concerns I’d raised about reversibility weren’t for being able to take the patient out the coma. They were for being able to rehabilitate said patient after bringing him or her out of the coma.
Lil’ Slugger, you can not dismiss these concerns as simply being details of implementation. They are serious flaws in the general idea - a years long coma is not simply an on/off switch for the mind, with no other effects on the body. You can’t have your induced coma without accepting the hazard of bed sores - not with current medical technology. You can’t have your induced coma without atrophy of muscle tone all through the body. Those are, at this time, inescapable consequences of long-term comas.
Until such time as you can show me that quadroplegics are safe from bed sores, I’m never going to accept induced comas as a ‘reversable’ long-term possibility for convicted felons.
Well, to match your Christopher Reeve anecdote, Sunny von Bulow apparently is still alive.
How inevitable would life-threatening bed sores be in this scenario, given reasonable safeguards and preventative measures? If that truly is the deal breaker, then fine, but I hope you could presesent some statistical evidence. Otherwise, we can just throw anectodes at one another all day long.
Heck, if you wanted to be nasty, you could have mentioned Terry Schiavo - by most odds she should have been killed by complications from her vegatative state long before she became a national cause celebre. I do contend, however that both Sunny Von Bulow and Terry Schiavo represent the far edge of the bell curve, where the example of Christopher Reeves is a bit more representative of the middle of the curve.
Well, the first thing that comes up with a Google search for “mortality bed sores” is this, which, while lacking any hard data does imply that there’s a serious concern about mortality from bed sores, though it is improving. Here’s an article that comes up when I added “NIH” to the search criteria: even looking at the summary, the statistics for mortality in long-term coma patients gets chilling, quickly:
I grant that the specific causes of mortality aren’t mentioned in the summary, and I’m not paying $32 for an article to let me settle an online argument, but the Google excerpt mentions pressure ulcers or bed sores as a chronic problem. I won’t claim that they’re the major cause of mortality, but I will say they are a signifigant factor.
I agree with Monty. You’d lose this on legal grounds. Denying a person consciousness would effectively be denying them their due process right to appeal.
Bit of a selective excerpt, don’t you think? Here’s the full paragraph, with a bit of my own emphasis thrown in:
I’m sure you left out that bolded part wholly inadvertently. Ahem. Moving on . . .
Once all appeals are done under current statutes, the state kills the prisoner in question. Not much chance of further appeals then, but this practice is upheld by the courts. So how is that worse than removing their consciousness but keeping them alive under the same circumstances?
Sorry, I don’t follow you. Maybe I’m uninformed, but isn’t a convict’s appeals process exhausted at some point? If not, how could the state ever execute anyone?
Your hypothetical creates a catch-22. The only reason why a condemned prisoner’s appeals eventual end is because they’re to be put to death.
A person who lives doesn’t have a finite number of appeals- they can continue to appeal as long as they have grounds as long as their life or sentence lasts. Because the convict *can *have appeals, they must be allowed to participate in them.
Current law also apparently forces people to continue appealing, regardless of whether they wish to or not. Personally I would view this as removing the rights of the person as much as anything else.
I don’t think that’s true. Nobody can be forced to make a legal appeal. But there are cases where other people will file an appeal on behalf of somebody else.
Running through the entire appeal process usually is an extended process that can go on for years or even decades. But there are points at which the courts can say to a condemned man, “you no longer have any appealable issues under current law and we’re proceding with the sentence.” This is fine from a legal standpoint because legal decisions are based on the law as it now stands. However, the law isn’t static. New laws and new decisions are made on a daily basis. So even if you have no grounds for appeal today, you might conceivably have them a year from now. But to be able to follow legal developments and know that a recent decision would affect your case, you would have to be awake.
Of course. Since there are so many studies out about the effects of long-term comas caused by reasons other than “traumatic brain injury” I had to cherry pick my quotes and stats.
:dubious:
For that matter, Lil’ Slugger, the full exerpt you quoted made it clear that it was a study focusing on secondary effects of such patients.
Emphasis mine. It seems to me, you’re showing a certain willful ignorance to claim that the study doesn’t support my claim that bed sores are a chronic problem for limited mobility patients, and a life-threatening one, at that.
You challenged me to find hard numbers regarding mortality and bed sores, and I believe I delivered. It’s not a 100% match with your hypothetical, but I do think it works for a starting point with some look at the long-term health effects of a coma. If the worst you can suggest is that the study I linked is not a perfect match for your hypothetical, find a better one. Without a large sample selection for your exact hypothetical, we are stuck finding studies that will cover parts of the situation. Which means, since we’re talking long-term comas, most of the available data are going to be on comas that are the result of “traumatic brain injury.”
Let me ask you this: Do you believe that long-term induced comas, which is what your proposal is advocating, will be signifigantly less morbid than those being discussed in that paper?
If you do, what studies can you point to that would support your position?
If you are forced to admit you can’t find a study suggesting that long-term comas are as safe as you seem to believe, offer me a convincing argument that induced long-term comas are not going to suffer from the same problems that ‘natural’ long-term comas have.
I checked, and was partly right. There’s an automatic “direct appeal” in at least some states (perhaps all) that is automatically started when you are sentenced with a death penalty. But this only happens once, not continuously.
Last year I wrote a short story set in the future, about a policeman punished for spying on the government by having his brain removed and installed in a type of robot which is basically a walking vending machine. He has to walk up and down the street over and over, and receives electrical shocks for straying off course or stopping. Meanwhile, he sees people he used to know, walking around and going about their business - completely unaware that the vending machine they pass is inhabited by his mind. He finally tries committing suicide by walking into the street and in front of a truck - and to his horror, survives and is simply transferred to a new vending machine, this one confined to a track.