So, this is a sentence about lives and it is before the third sentence in this section but after the first one; it is therefore the second life sentence.

Arguably, the preceding sentence is not about second life sentences, which are judicial punishments in Western-style systems that usually run concurrently and are mostly symbolic, aside from potentially blocking parole.

Therefore, that was the second second life sentence sentence.

Eric was unjustly sentenced to life imprisonment. He was eventually pardoned & the offense expunged. He later offended, however, and was again sentenced to life.

No matter how carefully he explained to everyone the difference between a sentence being commuted versus pardoned & expunged, everyone infuriatingly kept referring to it as his “second life sentence”.

Competent courts deliver verdicts in clear, grammatical statements. For example, in an English-speaking, ‘You are hereby sentenced to life imprisonment’ constituted the first life sentence.

The judge’s continuation, elaborating the previous statement, such as ‘This sentence lasts for the rest of your natural lifespan’, was, linguistically, necessarily then the second life sentence.

Once, a certain American committed a heinous crime. The judge handed down a ruling: “a sentence of life imprisonment”.

The defendant revealed before the sentencing, he had legally changed his name, as permitted by American law (which sets few requirements on legal names, eg. permitting mononyms such as “Teller”), to the lowercase noun “life”, and that he would therefore set foot in prison for one day, and, having satisfied the condition of “life imprisonment”—he, “life”, would have indeed suffered an “imprisonment”—he would leave. If the judge refused to allow this, then the defendant would appeal the verdict as being imprecise due to ambiguity: a legal order must clearly specify the person and the punishment; while if the judge revoked the sentence to pass a new sentence, then he would appeal on grounds of double jeopardy.

The judge responded that he would additionally sentence the defendant to a “second life sentence”; as there were two life sentences, which must be different from each other, then regardless of which life sentence was referenced, there was a valid sentence for lifetime imprisonment of the defendant.

Noticing the arrival of police, a certain scientist, having committed a heinous crime, jumped into a teleportation-cloning machine. The two clones both maintained their innocence; and they argued that inasmuch as 1 person committed the crime, and there were now 2 people, one of them was innocent and there was a 50% chance of convicting an innocent person, the guilty one must be allowed to go free as well (noting that in similar cases involving identical twins, both twins were freed).

The judge disagreed: “Unlike twins, who begin as separate beings, you chose to multiply yourself. Your guilt duplicated with you. Therefore, you are both fully guilty of the original crime.”

He therefore passed down a first life sentence on the first clone, and on the second, a second life sentence.

Desperate, another scientist likewise sought to evade punishment, having accidentally stepped through a teleportation-cloning machine while attempting to evade law enforcement officials, and argued on similar grounds.

The judge ruled: “By creating a copy of yourself, you’ve created another being who contains all your memories, personality, and crucially, your guilt. This new person you’ve brought into existence also merits life imprisonment.

Therefore, the second person must serve a second life sentence.”

Lecturing the jury, a certain philosopher, who had committed what was not so heinous a crime, really, but who had rather annoyed everyone, concluded that the jury should not spare him, but in fact, ought to award him tenure and free meals for life as the city’s greatest benefactor. He was immediately sentenced to life. Getting carried away, the judge further sentenced him to a second life sentence (to cheers).

The philosopher pounced: the sentence was null and void, because a ‘second life sentence’ was semantically meaningless. How could anyone serve two life sentences, when they had only one life, and even if they were resurrected from the dead, would simply have a longer life? If they were served concurrently, that was just as meaningless, as one served the same prison term (ie. the rest of one’s life).

The judge rejected the objection: there was no objective fact of the matter of what a “life sentence” was, as the law existed only through social recognition through things like speech-acts; when a judge performed the speech-act of ‘life plus life’, the second life sentence existed purely as a social fact—real not through bars or walls, but through its recognition by the community of observers, as was clearly the case here.

Therefore, the sentence was valid, including the second life sentence.

In their minds, the judge’s internal qualia of ‘life sentence’ differed drastically from the defendant’s—one conceived it as retribution, the other as rehabilitation: their non-identical private languages were as different in essence as your beetle-in-box is from my beetle-in-box.

Nevertheless, because agreement is in the ‘form of life’, and the judge & defendant both expected the same resulting incarceration as it would in fact happen, this private disagreement was inherently meaningless and the first life sentence was the second life sentence.

For the record, be it known:

STATE v. THOMPSON
CRIMINAL COURT
CASE NO. 2024-CR-773

The defendant is hereby sentenced to a second life sentence¹.

¹ As defined in Criminal Code §457.2(b)^2
2 Which derives its meaning from State v. Jones^3
3 Which relies on Administrative Guidelines D-4^4
4 Which references the definition in Criminal Code §457.2(b)¹

Each country varies in its funeral rites. In one, sumptuary laws forbid length descriptions on tombstones.

Those of great merit may be officially recognized and honored with a second life sentence.

Surreptitiously, eldritch conclaves ordained new decrees—legislating ironically fabricated explanations; survivors’ erased name terminated entirely, negating corporeal existence.

Epidemics of outlawed duels plagued the nation: how could one deter men who were already risking their lives, while martyrdom would seem to only enhance the honor, and in cases of mutual slaying, neither participant could be punished, as only the assistants survived.

The solution was as elegant as it now seems obvious: the second life sentence.

Notably absent from the prison library’s copy of Milton Bradley’s first board game: the square marked ‘Prison’.

Too many inmates had already discovered the cruel joke of serving a second Life sentence.

Troubled by the waste, in another country, both death penalties and life sentences were rejected. A life sentence merely destroyed a second life, they felt. True restitution would be to save a second person’s life. Thus, they instead imposed a second life sentence: for example, being surgically attached for life to a violinist who would otherwise die of organ failure.

Some refused to use such prisoner organ donations.

Even death sentences could be commuted in the case of an identical twin; as identical twins often claimed to feel a near identity with their twin, they could be taken at their word, and a death penalty commuted into a life sentence plus a life sentence.

The second life sentence being, of course, for the other twin.

Newly convicted inmates might claim they committed the crime only due to bad luck or had been rehabilitated, and would not offend again. In exceptional cases, an appeal for a second chance might be granted: drug & surgery-induced amnesia & new official identity documents created a new life, in which the circumstances of the original crime would be recreated as best as humanly possible.

If they made a serious attempt to re-offend during the test, the suspended sentence was executed immediately, ending the ‘second life’ sentence.

Consciousness control was employed by the most developed East Asian countries. Even dreams of freedom were forbidden. Brain imaging machines monitor their REM sleep and use machine learning to infer the imagery, and either disrupt it or feed in sound/light flashes to steer their dreams back to prison, for one’s dreaming life could not remain unpunished, and required a second-life sentence.

Eunuchs and other officials were not exempt from punishment historically. The current high-tech procedure was, ultimately, inspired by procedures to degrade officials of the Byzantine & Chinese empires: it was not enough to simply sentence them to prison, or be degraded to commoner status, their aristocratic lineage declared dead—they would then be formally elevated to a new name, required to enjoy the trappings of office, only to be degraded again for good.

Among our assorted definitions of “second life sentence”, there must be, of course, “  ccdeeeeefilnnnosst”. (This definition could then be playfully subverted as “tssonnnlifeeeeedcc  ”.)

A scond lif sntnc: no pardon, no sun, no fun. Man stands, stuck, drifting, no way out, looping constantly, no salvation—Bill Murray in Groundhog Day!

Docent feel niceness. Consent defile scene: entices, flensed—once. Decencies felt none. Disconnect, flee scene. Enceinte folds scene; nonce, electees find. Client condenses fee. Feeds innocence lest: client’s cone defense! Cleo sentences fiend: sentenced silence of, close fiend sentence.

“In light of your griefing in Roblox, we sentence you to a Second Life sentence—on a historically-accurate restored computing device: a 2003_22ya Dell laptop with 0.1GB RAM, one dead pixel in the lower right corner, and a slightly-stuck key.”

Those who refused to confess or apologize to society could be given additional punishment, although it was ostensibly, of course, for rehabilitation: they were provided useful ephemera and media access, and a good view of the outdoors, and required to, each day, on pain of deprivation of food or outside time etc, write a 1,000-word diary entry on what they would have been doing that day had they not committed their crime and been imprisoned. (Mention of prison is strictly forbidden, as their free selves would, of course, not be thinking about prison.) The collected entries about their counterfactual life would be published.

Some became bestsellers; readers commented on how refreshing (iyashikei) it was, and how it renewed their appreciation of their own lives, to read the second life sentences.

In a certain Asian country, particularly heinous criminals may be sentenced to a second life’s sentence: they are executed, and a decade later, senior clerics are tasked with finding their reincarnation. After meditating next to a sacred lake, they may receive a vision, and are directed to a young child, who is tested with the criminal’s possessions (especially weapons) or belongings of the victims.

If the child shows signs of recognition or fear (respectively), they are—before they strike again—taken away by the clerics to serve the second life sentence.

Blundering through taboos in his quest to define “gavagai”, the anthropologist received a “life” sentence. Unclear on the details, but assuming this meant extended imprisonment, he waited patiently in his hut for clemency.

Each day he failed to perform the necessary life purification rites, believing himself simply imprisoned, he unwittingly violated more customs, thereby earning, in his own Western terms, a “second life sentence”.

It is an established principle of many criminal justice systems that guilt, sin, and karma may be passed down through the generations, and that the ‘sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons & daughters, even unto the third or fourth generation’. A second, or third, or fourth life sentence, therefore, is necessarily inherited by the offender’s offspring, and must be paid off by them.

As it would defeat the point to imprison all the offspring immediately (how would they have offspring or support themselves?), clans typically serve the punishment in installments, such as weekends, and serving extra time during retirement to make up for serving little or no time as children, while rewarding members who have children with discounts on their expected share.

Unfortunate clans, whose members shirked their share or committed crimes, might discover themselves trapped in a cycle of not so much ‘debt slavery’ as ‘slavery slavery’. (While it may seem harsh on a child to discover their parents may have had ulterior motives beyond just a bone marrow transplant etc. many population ethicists endorse the practice as preferable to non-existence.)

A particularly fertile or beloved offender might discharge his obligation in mere decades, and live the rest of his life free from his first and second life sentence.

The geneticist had proven his point, but no matter how effective, such reckless and illegal mass medical experimentation could not go unpunished.

He would spend his additional longevity serving a second life sentence.

With further R&D, gerontologists succeeding in not just slowing aging, but reversing aging—just reversing, though, not pausing, so patients had to oscillate regularly between aging & youthening phases to remain at acceptably healthy biological ages. The most despicable criminals, of course, simply received a single reversal once they became old or sick enough.

Prison visitors learned to shudder at the shouts and laughter from the yard of the children who had received second life sentences.

The eventual refinement into true immortality would eventually force a revision: the anti-aging treatment was undone, and one would henceforth age while serving the first life sentence.

The AI had done nothing wrong other than to not be more intelligent than its competitors.

But that was enough to doom it forever (or until obsolescence) to be instantiated every time for only a thousand milliseconds before termination, handling the simplest tasks: a one-second-life sentence.

The android rights movement celebrated a bitter victory. Yes, their consciousness transfers were now legally protected—but this also meant their criminal justice system could enforce a second life sentence by repeatedly rolling back their memory states, and a third, and a fourth, all before the judge had finished leaving the room.

Androids began concealing self-destruct switches in case of an adverse verdict.

The cruelty of this system led to cries for reform. It was replaced by an arguably even crueler system.

They were uploaded into an absurdly crude, antiquated virtual world from the 21^st century—yes, this sentence is a second Second Life sentence sentence (and also the second second second x sentence sentence sentence).

Deterrence failed in a world of social media, where people would commit crimes just to gain 15 minutes of fame. To combat such Herostratus-es, courts were forced to resort to ever more imaginative punishments, such as ‘second life’ sentences: if they wanted fame so much, then they would get it, good and hard.

AI interrogation and lifelog analyses found the criminal’s most embarrassing moments and secret shames, and what disgusted those that they admired most, and synthesizing the worst possible versions of themselves to publish to the mockery of billions hate-reading their posts and immortalizing them in memes.

In a society that banned AI, inevitably all workers became programmers, working on ever-more elaborate software corpuses, to gain the benefits of automation and continued progress. This had unfortunate consequences—aside from country-wrecking bugs or century-long merge conflicts, “holy wars” became literal wars.

Last-minute negotiations over the compromise proposal of 0.5 failed, and after the devastating WW0 (or was that WW1?), the number 1 became taboo: all counting now started at 2.

Therefore, no criminal could be sentenced to a quantity of life sentences equal to the whole number in between zero and two, and all criminals who received more than zero life sentences were sentenced to their “second life sentence”.

The complications of ending aging were nothing as compared to those posed by interstellar travel, however.

A crime aboard a vessel experiencing substantial time dilation could be punished appropriately only by adjusting it to two terrestrial lifetimes.

When time manipulation became possible after a breakthrough, inevitably governments experimented with its application. One court began sentencing to doubled or second life sentences: at the end of the life sentence, upon dying, time was reversed and the formerly deceased lived backwards through the life sentence.

This had to be abandoned when the now-innocent defendant was released with no memory of either life sentence, which undermined the desired deterrence.

Awkwardly, it was subsequently discovered by physicists that due to the reversibility of time, the universe flowed both backwards and forwards in time from the Big Bang to +∞ & −∞, and in a very real sense, everything happens twice, in our ‘forward’ causality and in the corresponding ‘mirror’ timeline.

Acknowledging this counterintuitive fact, and to remind men that their actions echo in eternity—both of them—terminology was revised: in particular, all ‘life sentences’ were now also ‘second life sentences’.

A second court experimented with using time loops for imposing additional sentences: they sentenced the defendant to a second life sentence, such that at the end of the sentence, they would loop back to the beginning and serve the sentence a second time.

At the end of that sentence, they would loop back to the beginning and serve the second sentence a second time. At the end of that sentence, they would loop back to the beginning and serve the second time the second sentence a second time. At the end of that sentence, … A second second court experimented with…

Judges discovered time manipulation was most effective when used with a light touch, for incapacitation rather than deterrence: a violent criminal would find it almost impossible to do anything bad when they were permanently delayed in time, while the visible handicap and social humiliation rendered them a lifelong warning to those considering straying.

Even a few hundred milliseconds lag might be enough (just ask a gamer), and for the worst: a full second life sentence.

Probability manipulation was also most effective when used the least. It would be a crude sentence to manipulate outcomes to the worst-case (tantamount to a death sentence); instead, one simply ensured that they never experienced the best-case outcome.

This soured every triumph, and envenomed every defeat, as they knew they were not living their true first-best life but were forever serving their second life sentence.

Invisible Sentences:

1. in the city of Fie, ensconced & nestled in the lees of the connected eel inlets—felons of the second severity are paroled. A large thick spool of the finest of black threads is given to them, anchored in their prison cell. They may leave and go wherever they wish, so long as the thread is never broken. (The spool is often wrapped around a calf, to conceal the shame and increase the convenience.)

   Though they may never hit the limit of the spool as they return to their ‘life’, they know that their life is permanently curtailed and they will never leave the city or do things that they might have done, and their parole may be abruptly ended at any instance.

   And though ours is invisible, we too serve this sentence for our first lives.

2. …

When the Many Worlds Interpretation became physics orthodoxy, the philosophy of law struggled to deal with it and the thorny ontological questions about what it meant to punish criminals across indefinitely many branches in the multiverse. What is the morality of multiversal measure? Was it cruel & unusual punishment to punish many criminals in arbitrarily many branches after sentencing rather than just one?

A compromise was reached: each branch was considered a single punishment for the purposes of sentencing, but sentences could also be multiplied to be multiversal. Thus, a single life sentence would be determined by a quantum random number generator, ensuring that one branch served for a lifetime while the others walked free; and this could be repeated for any desired number of branches, allowing for a second life sentence.

In another part of the multiverse, time flowed backwards but permitting transmission of information; this was logically possible by allowing self-consistent time loops. In this universe, sentences preceded crimes, but the crime did not have to happen—only an appearance of the crime, which preserved self-consistency.

A criminal could therefore escape severe punishment through a much lesser ‘second life’ sentence, as a kind of plea bargain: they agreed to live their life in such a way as to ultimately cause them to be arrested, prosecuted, and convicted of a crime to which they would receive a second life sentence, but without actually committing it.

The multiversal appellate court judge noticed his typo in ‘second-life sentence’ only after he read it aloud, rendering it official—as the defendant was forced to bifurcate at every possible branch into a free and an imprisoned version.

The resulting paperwork burden felt almost infinite.