These days, the average death-row inmate typically spends years or decades between sentencing and execution, being guarded and maintained by unionized workers, and during that time some great numbers of appellate lawyers and judges and their legal secretaries and clerks and assistants engage in a very expensive ritual that generally has very little to do with the facts of the case at all. In some alternate reality, a convicted murderer could just say:
“The hell with it. No appeal at all. Give most of that money as restitution to the victim’s survivors, beyond that which the state would pay anyway. But a relatively small proportion should go to Alcor. I choose to submit to death by experimental in vivo vitrification under ideal conditions. At a time of their choosing, Alcor will test their theories about revivification on me first, before any other human subject. If I die, then justice will have been done. If I am successfully revived, then it will be shown that death itself can be conquered. In return for this, I would call upon the governor to commute my sentence to whatever is fair—fifty years imprisonment, for example. But then, I will go free!”
These days, the average death-row inmate typically spends years or decades between sentencing and execution, being guarded and maintained by unionized workers, and during that time some great numbers of appellate lawyers and judges and their legal secretaries and clerks and assistants engage in a very expensive ritual that generally has very little to do with the facts of the case at all. In some alternate reality, a convicted murderer could just say:
“The hell with it. No appeal at all. Give most of that money as restitution to the victim’s survivors, beyond that which the state would pay anyway. But a relatively small proportion should go to Alcor. I choose to submit to death by experimental in vivo vitrification under ideal conditions. At a time of their choosing, Alcor will test their theories about revivification on me first, before any other human subject. If I die, then justice will have been done. If I am successfully revived, then it will be shown that death itself can be conquered. In return for this, I would call upon the governor to commute my sentence to whatever is fair—fifty years imprisonment, for example. But then, I will go free!”