[mlthoughts2018]

It absolutely feels like a judge deciding “here’s the decision I want because it fits my personal understanding of conmon sense in this situation” — which is frightening since, based on my mom’s experience working in a variety of state & county judges’ offices, there’s not much reason to trust the common sense of judges at all, even when they are basically benevolent people (a lot of them aren’t).

[PhasmaFelis]

It's an interesting world we've come to where "you are alive, therefore you have not yet died" can be considered an idiosyncratic personal viewpoint.

[mlthoughts2018]

I did not say anything like that. I said the judge is trying to effectively inject the judge’s notion of common sense in an extralegal way.

The impression of whether the judge’s common sense is valid or invalid has utterly nothing to do with this issue at all. The issue is that off the cuff common sense reasoning is not rigorous legal reasoning, it can have all kinds of unintended consequences.

[PhasmaFelis]

> I did not say anything like that. I said the judge is trying to effectively inject the judge’s notion of common sense in an extralegal way.

The judge is describing the existing, well-established law in a slightly jokey manner.

[GavinMcG]

Why on earth do you claim the judge is doing this? The law in Iowa defines death as irreversible. What reason do you have for saying the judge's common sense is what's at play rather than, you know, the law?

[mlthoughts2018]

You’re really missing the point.

What if a prisoner suffers a brain trauma and it’s unknown if it’s irreversible or not? Or under some future law, the prisoner’s family can keep them on life support and their status as either having fully served the sentence or not has ramifications for life insurance payouts from a complex employment contract with a “morality” clause like some athletes have.

You could wheel the prisoner on a bed into the courtroom with machines beeping. What would this judge’s ruling say to do? You can “see” the “living” prisoner present, but it’s not medically or legally known at that moment if it’s reversible, and if it’s not, the declaration of “death” actually has urgent ramifications for other people.

It’s precisely because there can be such complicated corner cases that we absolutely should not accept a judge’s snappy line of rhetoric about seeing the prisoner present in the courtroom as legal basis.

This has direct implications because that one-off armchair wisdom of that one judge suddenly affects what the state definition of death means by “irreversible” even if that was not the common sense intention.

It has nothing at all to do with loopholes for this particular prisoner.

[GavinMcG]

> You could wheel the prisoner on a bed into the courtroom with machines beeping. What would this judge’s ruling say to do? You can “see” the “living” prisoner present, but it’s not medically or legally known at that moment if it’s reversible, and if it’s not, the declaration of “death” actually has urgent ramifications for other people.

Which is why the same law also says that "In the event that artificial means of support preclude a determination that [spontaneous respiratory and circulatory] functions have ceased, a person will be considered dead if in the announced opinion of two physicians, based on ordinary standards of medical practice, that person has experienced an irreversible cessation of spontaneous brain functions."

I mean, seriously, just Google "Iowa death definition" and you can find all this. There is no loophole whereby the judge gets to just go with his gut.

> It’s precisely because there can be such complicated corner cases that we absolutely should not accept a judge’s snappy line of rhetoric about seeing the prisoner present in the courtroom as legal basis.

It's not the legal basis. It's, like you said, a snappy line of rhetoric. In the written decision/order the judge will refer to the statute and to the uncontested fact that the man's lack of respiratory and circulatory functioning was reversed.

> This has direct implications because that one-off armchair wisdom of that one judge suddenly affects what the state definition of death means by “irreversible” even if that was not the common sense intention.

No, it doesn't. A judge's snappy rhetoric doesn't make new law. You're tilting at windmills here.