He Died, Then Came Back to Life—So Did He Serve His Life Sentence? The Case That Stunned the Courts

Image Credit, Jake Parkinson

In a case that seems plucked straight from the pages of a legal thriller, an Iowa inmate serving life without parole made international headlines after briefly dying in prison—only to be revived and later argue in court that his life sentence had technically been fulfilled. This is the true story of Benjamin Schreiber, a convicted murderer whose bizarre argument pushed the boundaries of legal interpretation and sparked an unexpected ethical and philosophical debate about what it truly means to serve a life sentence.

The origins of this case trace back to 1996 when Schreiber was convicted of the brutal killing of John Dale Terry. According to court records, Schreiber lured Terry to a mobile home in Agency, Iowa, and beat him to death with a wooden handle, allegedly as part of a plot involving Terry’s girlfriend. The crime was violent, premeditated, and cold-blooded. A year later, in 1997, Schreiber was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, a sentence that, under Iowa law, means imprisonment until natural death.

For over two decades, Schreiber served his time behind bars. But in 2015, his story took a bizarre turn. He became gravely ill, suffering from large kidney stones that led to septic poisoning. He was transported from the Iowa State Penitentiary to the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, where he went into cardiac arrest. Medical records show that Schreiber was clinically dead for several minutes. His heart had stopped. According to the medical team, he required resuscitation five times and was administered adrenaline multiple times in order to revive him.

The incident was not just a brush with death—it was death, medically speaking, albeit briefly. The prison’s own records and the paramedics involved confirmed that Schreiber had no detectable heartbeat for at least two minutes. That fact would become the centerpiece of a legal argument that no court had ever heard before.

In 2018, three years after his revival, Schreiber filed an appeal in the Iowa District Court. His claim was straightforward, though audacious: since he had been declared dead, even momentarily, he had technically fulfilled the terms of his life sentence. According to Schreiber and his legal counsel, the state’s obligation to imprison him “for the rest of his life” had been satisfied when his heart stopped. The argument was bold, literal, and entirely unprecedented.

Unsurprisingly, the district court dismissed his petition. The court found the argument “unpersuasive and without merit,” noting that Schreiber was, in fact, still very much alive. The idea that a life sentence could be nullified by a brief clinical death was not only legally questionable, but it also ran contrary to both common sense and public policy.

Schreiber wasn’t done. He appealed to the Iowa Court of Appeals, where the case again drew considerable attention. In November 2019, the appellate court upheld the district court’s ruling. In her opinion, Judge Amanda Potterfield wrote that Schreiber’s sentence “does not end until a coroner declares him dead for good.” She added, with no small amount of judicial wit, “Schreiber is either alive, in which case he must remain in prison, or he is dead, in which case this appeal is moot.”

Despite the clear dismissal, the case forced legal scholars to consider the deeper implications. What exactly does a “life sentence” entail? Is it a continuous period of biological life, or could a momentary medical death trigger legal loopholes? Could future cases test the boundaries of this interpretation even further, especially as medicine becomes more capable of reviving people after prolonged periods of clinical death?

Experts largely agree that Schreiber’s case is legally clear-cut. A life sentence, they argue, means the entire span of a person’s biological life, regardless of temporary medical events. Dr. Feridun Sinanoglu, a legal theorist at the University of Iowa, noted in commentary that “the law deals with continuity and presence. A temporary cessation of heart activity does not meet the threshold of biological death in the legal sense.” Others pointed out that allowing such an argument could open the door for potentially dangerous precedents, such as intentionally inducing clinical death to escape imprisonment.

Still, the case is more than a novelty. It exposes the tensions between medical definitions and legal interpretations. Medical professionals deal in seconds and cellular activity. The law, on the other hand, views life in terms of legal identity and civil obligations. The two often complement each other, but in rare cases like Schreiber’s, they can collide in surreal and unexpected ways.

To this day, Benjamin Schreiber remains incarcerated at the Iowa State Penitentiary in Fort Madison. His attempt to be released based on a technicality of death was denied at every level. There is no public record that he appealed the decision to the Iowa Supreme Court or pursued federal habeas corpus relief.

While the courts were unequivocal in their judgment, the case remains a striking example of the complexities embedded within seemingly simple legal language. A “life sentence” might sound definitive, but in practice, the law must still grapple with the evolving realities of medicine, language, and logic.

For now, the final word remains with the court: a person who is sentenced to spend the rest of their natural life in prison does not fulfill that sentence until life, as it is legally and biologically understood, has truly and permanently ended. Schreiber may have briefly escaped death, but he could not escape the law.