Leap Seconds: Legal reductio ad absurdum

In May of 2003 ITU-R Special Rapporteur Group 7A convened a meeting in Torino to discuss the possibilities of redefining UTC without leap seconds. When the results of that meetings first became available the LEAPSECS mailing list started a discussion about the possible effects that UTC without leap seconds might have on legal issues. The thread quickly became a case of reductio ad absurdum. This is a stripped synopsis of the content of that discussion.

2003-06-05T13:10:10 -0700, Brian Garrett

A propos of both the topic and the discussion of notation, I've observed that in the U.S., hospitals (where 24-hour notation, or "military time" as civilians inevitably call it) are one of the few businesses where wall clocks are nearly always set to the correct time (within+/- one minute, and often within +/- 10 seconds, as checked against my WWVB watch). The correct time on birth and death certificates is important, but I was not aware of how important until I saw a posting from Prof. David Mills on comp.protocols.time.ntp in which he said that UT1 (not UTC) is the legal standard for death certificates. My reaction was that this is fascinating if true, but even if it is (I couldn't find any documentation of this), I would have to wonder how DUT1 becomes an issue if the tolerance is (as currently) less than one second?

Does anyone have any firshand knowledge of forensic medical issues related to DUT1? The implications of removing the 0.9s limit are clear if Prof. Mills is correct, but my impression was that time-of-day need only be precise to within one minute for birth and death certificates.

2003-06-05T13:26:25 -0700, Tom Van Baak

I'd be interested to hear how one measures the leading edge of the human life to death transition pulse with a precision that makes the UT1 vs. UTC question even relevant.

2003-06-06T07:37:57 +0100, Peter Bunclark

A husband has a will leaving everything to his wife, or if she dies first, to their children. The wife has a will leaving everything to her secret lover. They are together in a car crash, and are put on life-support systems including heart monitors. They both, sadly, die at around the same time; both have a last-recorded heartbeat.

2003-06-06T10:44:30 +0100, Markus Kuhn

Peter Bunclark wrote on 2003-06-06 06:37 UTC:
The correct time on birth and death certificates is important, but I was not aware of how important until I saw a posting from Prof. David Mills on comp.protocols.time.ntp in which he said that UT1 (not UTC) is the legal standard for death certificates.

http://www.google.com/groups?selm=3D62BE42.359C0C9E@udel.edu

Well, he really doesn't go into a great amount of detail, about why his Coroner Standard Time (CST) should be an integral hour offset to UT1 exactly.

A husband has a will leaving everything to his wife, or if she dies first, to their children. The wife has a will leaving everything to her secret lover. They are together in a car crash, and are put on life-support systems including heart monitors. They both, sadly, die at around the same time; both have a last-recorded heartbeat.
To anyone with even a basic understanding of human biology and modern intensive care practice, the notion that death could be determined within better than a minute, not to mention within 1000 ms, is nothing but ridiculous. Humans stay perfectly concious and altert up to about 12-15 seconds after the last heartbeat (even after decapitation, as Voltaire demonstrated during the French revolution so elegantly in his famous very last scientific experiment), and at normal body temperature, the central nervous system starts to suffer irreparable damage at about 200-300 seconds after the blood flow stops (~10x longer at 10 K lower temperature). Except for extreme accidents involving detonations or crashes (e.g., two planes colliding with GPS-guided 1-m precision alignment during a leap second in 2015, whose flight recorders use UTC and TI respectively), death is nothing but the gradual accumulation of tissue damage, and life is a function of the patience and funding of your intensive care team.

The medical definition of death is simply the minute at which a doctor decides that this patient is dead and looks at a clock to turn this into the legal transaction that makes further recusitation attempts unnecessary. Or did you never wonder, why in so many reports critically wounded people transported in ambulances die the minute they arrive at a hospital, but almost never during transport?

Anyone who ever attended a birth will also be able to attest that it is equally a gradual process that takes significatly longer than 1000 ms.

I seriously doubt that the authors of the US regulations for timestamps on death certificates even understand the difference between GMT, UT1 and UTC, neither have they any practical need to do so.

2003-06-06T08:45:03 -0700, Steve Allen

2003-06-06T07:37:57 +0100, Peter Bunclark:
A husband has a will leaving everything to his wife, or if she dies first, to their children. The wife has a will leaving everything to her secret lover. They are together in a car crash, and are put on life-support systems including heart monitors. They both, sadly, die at around the same time; both have a last-recorded heartbeat.
But suspecting her nature, the husband had insisted on a prenuptial agreement that nullified her inheritance rights until the marriage passed its first anniversary. After having tea at home with his kids, they were travelling on their way to a second honeymoon. Their recorded times of death were both only seconds past midnight.

While preparing for probate some of the lawyers note that the recorded times of death were after midnight according to the new leap-free UTC, but before civil midnight as defined by existing statute. During the ensuing legal discovery free-for-all other lawyers find that one of the hospital maintenance technicians sets the clocks on the heart monitors using new leap-free UTC, and another sets them according to the GMT-based statute.

After the judge awards the inheritance, the losing parties sue the hospital for failing to maintain standard practices.

Leap Free Civil Time: boldly going where no mysogynistic case law fantasy has gone before.

2003-06-06T08:57:13 -0700, Kevin J. Rowett

Many wills and living trusts these days are written to provide for concurrent death events of both spouses, even to the point of defining concurrent to be within 30 hours of each other.

2003-06-09T08:15:12 +0100, Peter Bunclark

So move the deaths exactly (exactly?!!!) 30 hours apart and I'll see you in court...

2003-06-09T10:52:11 +0100, Clive D.W. Feather

Markus Kuhn said:
Many wills and living trusts these days are written to provide for concurrent death events of both spouses, even to the point of defining concurrent to be within 30 hours of each other.
I wonder where the 30 hours come from. Is is something like 24 h plus the time zone uncertainty interval in the main habitat of US lawyers?
Um, my will defines it as 30 *days* - so does my wife's.

[For those wondering, the reason is to avoid inheritance tax hitting twice. Inheritance by spouses is free of tax, but all other inheritance pays tax (currently 40% on everything over the first 255,000 pounds). Without the clause, if we die close in time, all the property of one is inherited by the other (tax free) and then, minutes or hours later, by our children. With the clause, half the property goes from each of us to our children, who therefore profit by up to 40% of 255,000 pounds compared with the default arrangement.]


Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org>
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