"Over the weekend, I borrowed a friend’s time machine and cold-bloodedly killed a Neandertal, a Homo erectus, an Australopithecus, a dolphin, a chimp, eight sentient robots, the first extraterrestrial visitor to Earth, and my neighbor with the unreasonably loud sound system. Question: in the eyes of the law, how many murders did I just commit?" — John Rennie on the ongoing debate about intelligence, species, and the rights of non-human persons. Read his great story at Smart Planet. (Via Philip Yam) NOW WITH WORKING LINK!

  • cellocgw

    Working link, please?

  • Scott Barrie

    Dead link?

    • Lobster

       Murdered link.

      • twency

        Deceased nonhuman person link.

  • ciacontra

     Depends on whether or not you’re in the South.

  • Dan McGovern
  • Brainspore

    You mean under current law, or according to the robohegemonic accord of 3017?

    • Lobster

       Robosexuality is unnatural! 

      • Brainspore

        Yes on Proposition ∞!

  • user1234567

    It depends on what the laws were at the times he did the killing. The first three were all pre-law, so they’re out. The last one is likely a murder. For the others we need to know where he was on the timeline to guess, and if it was in the future there may be new laws.

    And why 8 robots? Are robots 1/8th of a person?

    • robotnik

      Awww, maaaaaan!

      • Donald Petersen

        Quiet, you.  We don’t serve your kind here.

  • Mister44

    This depends – when are we trying the person – now or in the future?

    Assuming it was today:

    Neandertal – no
    Homo erectus, – no
    Australopithecus, – no
    a dolphin, – no
    a chimp, – no
    eight sentient robots, – no
    the first extraterrestrial visitor to Earth, – no
    my neighbor with the unreasonably loud sound system. – no, I mean yes

    In the future with time travel murder laws, you might get murder for everything  but the chimp or dolphin. (Or dolphins and chimps may be protected in the future against any killing.) It really depends how hard the Neanderthals lobby to have them and other early hominids labeled as “human”.

  • voiceinthedistance

    If you were a neighborhood vigilante, then you were just keeping the streets clean.

  • Guest

    With the possible exception of the neighbor with the annoying sound system (and possibly even that one if you did it in the past or future) you will have committed zero crimes, murder or otherwise. You won’t be permitted to. If you do something criminal while time traveling, someone (possibly yourself!) will later go back and stop you from doing it.

    And yes, everybody kills Hitler the first time they go back.

    • SomeGuyNamedMark

       If I’m on the jury then you’d be safe killing the obnoxious neighbor.

    • Guest

      Not true! Amy Pond left him locked in a cupboard!

      • novium

        Also not true! It was Rory who punched Hitler in the face and locked him in a cupboard!

        • Guest

          spoilers!

    • Mister44

       I wrote  a time travel story where a time traveler is stopped by another one as he tries to kill Hitler. Turns out killing  a young Hitler would let someone worse come to power and the Germans then would control all of Western Europe.

      • SomeGuyNamedMark

        I think Stewie from Family Guy stole your idea.

        • Brainspore

          It’s easy to steal ideas from other people if you have a time machine. If you play your cards right you can even sue the original author for copyright infringement.

        • Mister44

           All well and good, except I wrote it in high school *mumblemumble* years ago. Way before Family guy was on TV. Not that it is the most original idea. It sounds like something Harlen Ellison or Rod Serling would come up with.

  • xian

    Turns out it was a suicide, the Neandertal happened to be kin.

  • dragonfrog

    A number of commenters seem to be assuming Autralopithecine, Neandertal, and Homo Erectus did not have laws.  Is that necessarily the case?

    They almost certainly didn’t have written laws, since it’s probably a good assumption they existed prior to the advent of written language.  But that doesn’t at all imply that they lacked laws, any more than modern cultures with non-written languages (necessarily) do.

  • http://twitter.com/sirkowski Sirkowski

    It’s a trick question; you can’t travel back in time.

    • Brainspore

      He traveled to a future time when Neanderthals and Homo erectus have been cloned back into existence, silly.

  • Lobster

    What color was the alien?  There’s recently been a lot of crime in my neighborhood and it’s usually committed by green aliens.

  • SomeGuyNamedMark

    What if instead of killing them they all walk into a bar instead?

  • Purplecat

    There’s an awful lot to unpack here before we even get to the actual point under debate. We can’t get agreement on what “rights”, “person”, and “human” mean, so talking of “the rights of non-human persons” is jumping to a fairly large number of conclusions even before we even start on the unspoken assertion of these rights.

  • fett101

    If I go back in time and murder my father before I was conceived can I be executed for murdering myself?

  • Donald Petersen

    How many murders?  Well, since we’re talking time travel here, should we also declare that we require Justice from the defendant, for all the victims and their descendants (if any)?

    Sorry… suddenly I felt like I was channeling Charles Becker, the Mayor of the Munchkin City in the county of the Land of Oz.