The impression of whether the judge’s common sense is valid or invalid has utterly nothing to do with this issue at all. The issue is that off the cuff common sense reasoning is not rigorous legal reasoning, it can have all kinds of unintended consequences.
The judge is describing the existing, well-established law in a slightly jokey manner.
What if a prisoner suffers a brain trauma and it’s unknown if it’s irreversible or not? Or under some future law, the prisoner’s family can keep them on life support and their status as either having fully served the sentence or not has ramifications for life insurance payouts from a complex employment contract with a “morality” clause like some athletes have.
You could wheel the prisoner on a bed into the courtroom with machines beeping. What would this judge’s ruling say to do? You can “see” the “living” prisoner present, but it’s not medically or legally known at that moment if it’s reversible, and if it’s not, the declaration of “death” actually has urgent ramifications for other people.
It’s precisely because there can be such complicated corner cases that we absolutely should not accept a judge’s snappy line of rhetoric about seeing the prisoner present in the courtroom as legal basis.
This has direct implications because that one-off armchair wisdom of that one judge suddenly affects what the state definition of death means by “irreversible” even if that was not the common sense intention.
It has nothing at all to do with loopholes for this particular prisoner.
