Did you hear about...

... the guy in India who's not dead?

The thing is, everyone in his family thinks he's dead, and therefore when he recently turned up at the doorstep, the family is convinced it's his ghost that's come back to haunt them.

How did this happen? It seems that "...rumors over his death began when he was sent to prison in October for a minor tax infraction. He fell ill there and was transferred to a prison hospital in another district, from where word spread that he had died and that his body had been cremated because no one had retrieved it. After being turned away by his neighbors after his release, he finally went to the police, who are trying to help convince the people of Katra that he is alive..."

All the best to him!! ((Yahoo!News article HERE)

And this reminded me of what could essentially be the other side of the coin, as explored in one of the episodes of Da Vinci's Inquest:

A prisoner who is serving a life sentence dies en route to the hospital due to a heart attack or something, but somehow comes alive again. He then argues that since he was legally dead, his sentence is now over and he's a free man. There's some legal wrangling about whether he was officially pronounced dead, etc, but in the end, the prisoner's argument wins the day.

Before Da Vinci goes to officially report the dude's death, D asks him whether he's sure he wants to do this: after all, without a valid birth certificate he'd not get a Social Insurance Number (I suupose it's like the social security # here in the u.s.?) which pretty much means no job - essentially he doesn't exist anymore (tho I dunno just how solid D's argument is here... after all, it's not too hard to secure a false/new identity if you know the right people, so D's argument doesn't hold water maaah)

The soon-to-be-free prisoner replies that he sees it another way: no more jail time, no need for parole... he's getting a clean slate.

I like that style of thinking :-)