Informed Consent
Categories: Regulations
"Yes, you can inject me with that poison to see how my body handles it. But I get 7 years off my prison sentence then, right?"
Well, the prisoner is consenting to the injection. At least in the U.S. we might ask first; in other countries, prisoners are pretty much guinea pigs for a raft of experiments.
The key notion here is that "informing" was done before the prisoner consented, and if the guy died and his family sued and the court looked at the process, would it determine that the prisoner had enough knowledge to, in fact, knowingly consent or understand the poison that was being tested on him? Well, if it were a Bond villain with 3 PhDs from some evil German University, then maybe. If it were a shmo off the street, eh, probably not.
Informed consent is a dicey legal term that has sadly come to be a big thing on college campuses in the modern era, as alcohol-driven sexual encounters have driven a raft of lawsuits wherein one party or another was, in fact, legally "incapacitated," and didn't have the mental capability at the time to consent to, um...doin' it.