Benjamin Schreiber had spent years in prison for murder when his body offered him an escape no lawyer could have imagined. In 2015, septic intoxication caused his heart to stop several times. Doctors resuscitated him, even though he himself had signed a “Do Not Resuscitate” order.
Schreiber decided to turn that contradiction into a legal argument. He filed a petition in the Iowa courts claiming that, having technically died, his life sentence had been extinguished. The logic was simple: if the punishment was to live imprisoned forever, and he had stopped living, even if only for a few minutes, then the sentence had already been served.
The Iowa Court of Appeals rejected the argument in 2019 with a phrase that went around the world: Schreiber “was either still alive, in which case he had to remain in prison, or he was dead, in which case this appeal was moot”. He died in prison in 2023, at age 70, leaving behind one of the most unusual legal attempts in modern judicial history.