Scots Law thought that it had answered the question already: ‘What happens when a “dead” person is not actually dead?’ A hundred years before, Maggie Dickson was an unfortunate barmaid who found herself pregnant with an illegitimate baby on the way. The baby was later found dead by the banks of the River Tweed. The hapless Maggie was found guilty of murder and sentenced ‘to be hanged’. Thus it was that Maggie Dickson found herself climbing the scaffold in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket on 2nd September 1742. The hanging itself was pretty pedestrian except for reports that a group of medical students had started a fight when they were trying to cut down Maggie’s body and sell it to the dissection rooms. The body was put in a cart. Half way on the journey to her grave in Musselburgh, the drivers popped in for a ‘quick one’ in a local inn, leaving the coffin in the cart. When they came out, according to some stories, they found Maggie sitting upright in the box, as right as rain. The problem became a legal one. She had already been punished in the prescribed form and could not be tried again for the same crime. So they let her go. ‘Half-Hangit Maggie’ lived for another 40 years. Her enduring legacy to the Law of Scotland was to change the wording of the sentence from the simple word ‘hanged’ to the more all-encompassing phrase ‘hanged until dead’.