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!"
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.