I'm honestly not sure I trust myself on this one. Our moral intuitions tend to go pear-shaped when confronted with infinities or near-infinities, as Dust Specks/Torture amply demonstrates.
But I'll bite anyway. Our current judicial toolkit is a pretty crude hack, at its best not much better than the death penalty, but its goals are generally held to be some mixture of deterrence, retribution, and reformation. At least the latter two are well served by punishments that don't involve the death penalty, an effective death penalty like denying life extension, or near-infinite punishment terms.
From a reformative perspective I think we can expect any desired amount of reformation to be pretty quick; it would take far less than a transhuman lifespan to voluntarily reinvent oneself almost completely, and it'd be all the quicker if we allow involuntary methods. From a retributive perspective, I'd expect any punishment to be proportional to the mental harm caused to others by the crime, which once again is small in comparison to the criminal's potential lifespan.
I'm not sure what the effects on deterrence would be, but I doubt they'd change the overall picture.
from a retributive perspective I expect any punishment to be proportional to the mental harm caused to others by the crime, which once again is small in comparison to the potential lifespans here.
Depends, if the crime is murder how do you count the harm caused by ending someone's near-infinite life?
I'm not sure what the effects on deterrence would be, though.
I haven't fully worked out my theory of deterrence, but the crude first approximation, as briefly discussed here, is that the disutility to the criminal of the punishment should be greater than ...
If someone is sentenced to life in prison or the death penalty, should they also be prohibited from signing up for cryonics? Specifically, I'm referring to people like these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_death_row_inmates
I am not talking about providing it for them, just allowing them to sign up for it provided they can somehow get enough money together and allowing a response team into the prison to retrieve the body after the prisoner has died or been executed by lethal injection. I think they should be allowed access to cryonics, because we don't know enough yet about the brain to determine how much of their criminal behavior is due to mental illness/disorder and how much is due to free will. It may be possible to diagnose and cure people like Jeffrey Dahmer in the future before they commit any crimes, or to cure those already in prison such that they won't commit any more crimes.
As cryonics gets more and more popular, this will become an issue, especially when the first death row inmate wants to sign up for it.