Quote:
Originally Posted by sixto
That's a tricky one (and very poorly introduced). If the result of one's actions leaves a victim in a vegetative state, can that person be tried for murder? By TV crime show standards it would be at most attempted murder. Consequently, can the original person be [re]tried for murder if there is a medical decision to pull the plug? Would there be a follow-up trial on the new charge?
The puzzle is defining rules and standards for pronouncing alive someone who has never been.
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But IF you use a heartbeat as the defining issue then as long as the heart beats, it cannot be murder since the person is alive. Now if YOU pull the plug that is a whole different story but either way, I didn't kill the man. Any other charge, maybe but I certainly didn't kill him since his heart was beating and therefore was alive.
The way I see it, the heartbeat argument seems to be trying to use something to grasp at straws. In the early stages, it is little more than a beat from a 2 chambered heart, IIRC. However, if you insist on using that as a standard of whether it is alive or not then as long as the heart beats, you cannot declare it dead which means the poorly worded extension is valid. You are not dead till someone stops that heart beating. If you use the same standards, you can decide if that blob of cells is as alive as a tumor or whether it meets the same standard of "alive" as you or I.