Life Support to Prisoner's Severed Head Lost in Power Outage, Family Wins

[Kire]

:parody:

Illinois Loses Death Battle

When convicted murderer Mark Howard was sent to prison ten years ago with a sentence of 'life, with a minimum of 25 years', Illinois citizens thought his case was closed.

To the chagrin of the state corrections department, Howard died during the power outage of August 2003 as the life support equipment keeping him alive the past seven years lost power.

Howard should have died in 1997 when he was accidentally crushed in a freak accident at the prison. Since that time his severed head has been on artificial life support so that he can technically serve out the minimum 25 years of his life sentence.

Howards family is in the process of suing the State of Illinois for breach of contract. They claim that the sentence was a binding contract and provided a guarantee that he would live for at least 25 years from sentencing.

Currently, the lawsuit is in appellate court, as the state is appealing the verdict from district court which awarded Howards family $35 million in damages. --Staff

[ooglymoogly]

1. OMG is that what was in my chili

[signmike]

2. There was a case here in SoCal a few years ago

where these guys had a bunch of severed heads in freezers in a rental storage bin. When the cops busted them and started taking the heads for evidence the guys claimed that action would kill the people, who had paid a ton of money to be frozen for future cures.

I never heard the end of that one --probably still in Limbo in the courts.

[Che_Nuevara]

5. I'm not familiar with the particular case,

but I am familiar with the pertinent law. Cryogenic freezing of human beings after death, "so that they might be revived later when we have the technology", actually does occur, albeit rarely. A person with enough money to pay for the process and the storage space can have his body stored after death.

A cryogenically frozen person, however, is considered legally dead: he displays no biological functions or signs of life. Thereby a) freezing a live human being is, by law, murder, and b) a frozen body (or head) is considered property, not life, and could be used as states evidence, such as in the above case.

[mikehiggins]

3. THis is a hoax, folks

You cannot support a severed head on life support except on Futurama. No government official, or medical authority, would even consider doing something like that. No court would award damages in a suit like that, even if the basic premise was possible, which it isn't.

For pity's sake people, scientists don't have a clue how the whole thing hangs together, let alone keep blood, oxygen and whatever else is needed to keep a head "alive".

Weird night.

[Q3JR4]

4. Ummm...

:parody:?