People are legally dead when they are frozen (and I believe must be legally dead before freezing). It’s cryonics advocates who argue that they aren’t truly dead (and calling them dead is a nice social fiction that saves on health-care costs).

BTW, I tried to find the heart transplant story (it’s brilliant), but I couldn’t.

In these case, I think that will be against the “spirit” of death penalty authorize that

“What if a criminal sentenced to life-in-prison asks to be cryogenically preserved should he die in prison? What if they are sentenced to multiple consecutive life sentences?”

In these case there is an aditional problem: life-in-prison has different names in differents circunscriprions (sp?): “perpetual prision”, “prision for life”, “prison until the end of natural life”, “prision for [some number bigger than 100] years”, etc. and these (apparently, irrelevant) differences can be very relevant in a case like that, specially for the question “if you preserve the body and, some years after, ressuscite him, what to do with him?” (btw, there already was a case of a prisioner sentenced to “prison until the end of natural life” who requested release after receiving a heart transplant, or something like that).

In the case of “perpetual prision” is easy, the ressucited body should remain in prision; in the other cases, it is more complex (for example, in a prisioner senteced to 300 years of prision, the years when he was frozen should count?)

However, attending that (I think) people are frozen before death, this simplify much: because he never died, he is still in his life, than should remain in prision.