In Oregon and Washington there are laws defining acceptable conditions to hasten death with lethal medication. The Montana Supreme Court has ruled that it is not illegal for a doctor to give medication to hasten death to a terminal patient. Given cryonics lifesaving intent, it ought to be possible to establish that inducing cryopreservation in a non-clinically-dead person is separate from medical hastening of death, assisted suicide, or murder, and to establish protections for providers and patients in this situation.

I would also argue that vitrification[*] deserves (and could be proven in court by competent lawyers to be) a separate matter from straight-freezing as well as normal death. There are two reasons for this.

The first is that the scientific community has not actually rejected vitrification as a form of life-preservation, and credible expert testimony claiming that a vitrified brain equals a dead human being is relatively unlikely to surface. Public statements by scientists opposing cryonics consistently refer to straight freezing, not vitrification, as being irreparable even by advanced future technologies.

Secondly, on a practical level, vitrification is very hard to do and not likely to be achieved by a murderer. Therefore, permitting vitrification of living individuals is unlikely to make it hard to prove an actual murder, whereas permitting straight-freezing of the legally and clinically alive could in theory lead to murderers putting their victims severed heads in freezers and thus being let off on lesser charges.

[*] Achieved by replacement of water with high molality of vitrificants. Cryobiologists distinguish between this "equilibrium" vitrification (E-VT) and "kinetic" vitrification (K-VT) which is achieved by extremely rapid cooling and thus is limited to small cell samples. Due to toxicity of current vitrificants at warm temperatures, and practical limits of diffusion, cellular death is generally observed upon thawing for a large organ preserved by E-VT, but good structural preservation is observed, and this is the method by which a rabbit kidney was successfully preserved and revived in 2004.