We can bring murder victims back to life by killing their murderers. Should we?

In My Humble Opinion
1

During my latest interdimensional [del]burglary expedition[/del] expert treasure-hunting journey, I managed to acquire a device called the Lazarus Engine–three of them, actually, of three different models. Lazarus Engines, as the name implies, can resurrect the dead, but only in certain circumstances. Specifically, the dead person has to have been murdered (by which I mean"died due to the action of another human being," whether or not that action was justified) and the Engine must kill another human being to bring back the first one. Exactly who that person must be depends on the model of Lazarus Engine used.

Model A works only if the person to be sacrificed is the person who killed the revenant-to-be. It must be used within 72 hours of brain death. If you try to use it on anyone other than the revenant’s murderer, the process will fail, and the intended sacrifice will be unharmed; you then have the option to try again within the 72 hour window. You can try as many times as you wish during those 72 hours, but once the time limit is up, the machine won’t work. You cannot resurrect someone with the machine who has been killed by it.

Model B of has most of the same limitations as Model A. However, the person to be sacrificed must be A murderer, not necessarily the murderer of the person to be resurrected. Only the timing matters. If you try to sacrifice someone who’s never killed any other person, the intended victim will be unharmed. And, again, you can try over and over during the 72 hours.

Model C works regardless of the relationship or lack thereof between the would-be-revenant and sacrificial victim–or, I should say, sacrificial victims. For this model, it matters not whether the victims have ever killed anyone. You have at most a week to make it work, and it requires more than multiple living persons to bring back one dead one. On Day One after the murder, you need 2 victims; on Day Two, 4 victims; on Day Three, 8; and so on to 128 victims on Day Seven. On Day Eight, you could kill a thousand people and it wouldn’t help the original person, though the intended sacrifices would still be dead.

In all cases, Lazarus Engines restore a person to whatever state of health, vitality, and mental acuity he or she possessed before being murdered. The revenant does not remember dying or being dead, and is not a zombie. Also in all cases, the death of the sacrifice occurs in less than a tenth of a second and is presumably painless.

All three models of Lazarus Engine are, obviously, magically powered black box tech. Trying to alter the settings is not advised; that’s what they were doing in Atlantis right before they island sank, and that’s what sank the island.

What shall we do with these devices? Shall we use all three Engines? Would one of you like to pop over to Narnia and give Models B & C to Aslan for safekeeping? Just model C? All three?

Thoughts, anyone? Bueller?

2

Machine A sounds good in theory, but the time limit is a problem. If it weren’t for that, I’d say, use it instead of the chair. All tit-for-tat, and if you’ve convicted the wrong guy it won’t work anyway. But you can’t hold a trial in 72 hours. I’ll have to think about this.

Machine B is a slippery slope. Sure, on paper bringing a person back to life by killing a killer is just karma. But who are we going to choose to get ressurrected? And the justice process- would the jury be as careful about due process of the law if they figure the death of one criminal would revive an upstanding citizen? And then there’s people who kill in self-defense. The whole thing is just asking for abuse.

As for Machine C- bury it in the Mariana Trench and forget about it. Or send it back to whatever universe you found it in, C.O.D.

3

Only if we can also apprehend and try every murder suspect within 72 hours. In other words, no.

4

It can only be used if the murderer himself is repentant and truly wants to trade places with the victim. Otherwise, it’s a no-go.

5

Model A would be pretty useless with its time limit. B&C, I agree, should go into the Marianas Trench, and not just for 20 minutes.

6

Machine A sounds awesome. My first reaction was that it would completely revolutionize murder police work (given that society agreed to use it, which I have absolutely no problem with, myself; if you take someone’s money/car/life, I feel that society has the right to demand that you replace it, and if you DON’T use the machine, how in heck is that fair to the poor victim?): given a murder, round up as many suspects as you can find in 72 hours and stick 'em through the machine. Rounding up suspects seems like a much easier job than finding evidence, etc., and all of those who made it through safely would be known to be innocent, thus freeing up the police to look for other suspects.

(Skald, don’t you write fiction? I would love to see the implications of Machine A explored more fully.)

I agree, Machines B and C are much more skiffy. I suppose I’d be okay with using Machine B for, like, convicted serial murderers (at least we’d get something out of them).

7

But what if multiple people conspire to murder one person?

8

I totally missed the part about how innocents would be unharmed.

Machine A is my cup of tea.

9

Two thoughts about Machine A.

First, it’s my understanding that it’s not really all that unusual to find the murderer more or less standing over the body; they killed in a rage or whatever and had no plans to conceal the body or the crime. So there would be cases where it would work, and the “doesn’t harm innocents” feature means you can use it without killing people who only look guilty.

It has another use, as an innocence detector, at least during those 72 hours. Likely suspects during that time who want to prove their innocence could volunteer to be run through; if nothing happens at least the cops will know THEY didn’t do it.

10

If Machine A (given that it is magic) works perfectly every time, could we make billions of copies to install in the entrance of every business and government building? Every building? We could basically eliminate the problem of murder overnight.

I agree with Der Trihs on its use as an innocence detector.

11

Obviously, if Model A is known to work perfectly as described, anyone accused of a killing in which they had no hand will say, “Hell, bring it on. It’s not gonna cost me anything more than a morning off work, and I’ll be exonerated.” But even that isn’t perfect. What if the murder “victim,” say, is an abusive husband whose wife killed him in self-defense. The machine will still work, but it’s not necessarily a just outcome. Can we sort through such issues in 24 hours?

12

I’m thinking that it will work on ANY ONE of them–which creates complications, if you think about it.

13

Trial? Stand in that box and push the button. There’s your trial.

14

I have a somewhat-similar treatment for a screenplay about this, actually. There’s only one version of the Lazarus Engine, which is SUPPOSED to work like Model A but may, in fact, work, like Model B. The protagonist is accused of a murder and is about to be put through the machine when he demonstrates his innocence of this crime through circumstantial evidence. The machine would still have worked on him because he’s a war vet who’s actually killed people, and he goes to work for the requisite shadowy agency to ensure that people get a farier shake.

15

Also, what if one person kills multiple people? Do you pick which one gets to come back by a lottery?

16

Legally, murder and self-defense are 2 different types of homicide, and are mutually exclusive of each other. A killing in self-defense is not murder. So which is it Skald - does the machine only kill murderers, or anyone who has taken the life of another for any reason? If it’s only murderers, then yeah, A & B are great. If it’s any killer, then A & B should be destroyed. C, in all cases, should be destroyed.

ETA: Whoops - just reread the OP, and you’ve already covered this. Destroy all 3 machines. Intent is vitally important when determining guilt, and these machines are useless at it.

17

My original thought was that B and C ought to be destroyed right away, without question. I was originally alright with the idea of A, but then I noticed this: “whether or not that action was justified”.

In short, machine A cannot be used as an innocence detector because it does not take into account self defense, something that would require a trial that would take longer than 72 hours. The machine is therefore useless, and given the potential for abuse ought to be destroyed as well.

18

Some other thoughts I had:

-What about accidents? It still seems like if Alice is responsible for Bob’s death, even if it was an accident, it’s more fair for Alice to die and Bob to live than for Bob to stay dead, but my mind sort of recoils at this.

-What about incidents of the sort “where a jury wouldn’t convict” – say, Alice killed Bob because he was responsible for killing her daughter Eve (but wasn’t found until the 72 hours had passed). It seems like one ought to be able to do something like confess to the crime, but claim sufficient reason not to go through the machine. I don’t know exactly how this would work, because it still seems unfair to the victim if the murderer claims “machine A exemption” and then it turns out that the murderer was just doing so to extend his own life – but you would have to have something like this, I think, to be fair.

(I didn’t even think about the self-defense angle until others brought it up. I don’t know that self-defense counts as murder (ETA: oops, this has already been covered). On the other hand… I wonder if self-defense in such a world with Machine A would be judged much more harshly. Because if you know you’ll be brought back to life, it is much less of an excuse to kill someone in self-defense. And if you are in, say, a remote area where someone might not find you in 72 hours, well, you may be off the hook for entry to Machine A. ETA: in any case, you would still want to be able to claim “machine A exemption” for self-defense cases.)

-What if Bob pays Eve to kill Alice? …I wonder if it would become much more common to hire assassins to kill people. The assassin could have a pretty good chance of escaping within the 72 hours, and if Bob is far enough away it may take 72 hours for the police to think of him as a suspect.

-This brings me to another thought: Is there only one (or a small finite number) of these machines? If so, I could imagine that murderers would immediately take a 72-hour trip to some far-away country. On the other hand, this could be taken as a pretty strong suggestion of guilt (another boon for the police).

This is very interesting!

19

I’m thinking that whatever mojo that Lazarus Engines A & B take advantage of is activated when one human decides to do violence to another. Thus if Alice accidentally hits Bob with her car, no mojo, and neither Model A or Model B will work. But (as I recall from my notes for the story, written a decade ago), for there to be any moral conflict, the machine must be unable to distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable intents to do harm to another.

I think either Model A or B would work under that circumstance. Nobody said that the bored Hyborean warlock who devised these thing cared about such niceties.

And I hadn’t thought of that. Of course, someone might respond, “Hey, there was nobody else around; am I supposed to trust that the cops will find my murderer within 72 hours?”

Only if by “destroyed” you mean “taken via continua device to Narnia and given to Aslan, or buried on Mars, or something else that keeps its physical integrity intact.” some equivalent." Given that Atlantis was destroyed when someone tried screwing with one, trashing it sounds risky.
As for the assassin question, Model A will work either on the hitman or the person who hired him, as both formed the requisite intent. In that casek even given perfect knowledge, I’m not sure WHO should get sacrificed. The person who hired the assassin is slightly more guilty, but the professional hitman is the bigger threat to the world.

For those worried about intent: if the Lazarus Engines actually existed, don’t you think the vox populi would be to use 'em anyway? More people will think, “Yeah, that’s a risk, but most murderers are druggies or whatever and I don’t care about them.” I’m sure anti-death-penalty types and the ACLU would oppose it, but the most they’d be able to do is require a really fast trial.

20

Absolutely! And I’m against the death penalty, too. (But a large part of the reason I’m against it is that I took to heart the bit where Tolkien says, “Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends.” And your machine would, well, sort of negate that.)

I wonder, in passing, what percentage of murders are self-defense? Too lazy to look it up. Anyway, going back to my idea of an “exemption” for a self-confessed murderer going through the machine (say, for self-defense), one would either have to be able to really quickly try such a person within 72 hours (which could conceivably be possible if the murderer gives himself up quickly, which would have to be a prereq of getting such an exemption) or subject the murderer to some sort of harsher penalty if it turns out the murderer is lying about taking the exemption (otherwise, all murderers would take it, right? their reasoning being, “well, I’m dead if I don’t take the exemption, and possibly not dead if I take the exemption and can convince a jury that it was justified.”) – since now it’s a real death instead of a reversible one. What’s harsher than death? Torture, or a painful death, probably wouldn’t fly. My next thought was public humiliation of some sort…