Eternal justice, after all?

I've written before about the prospect of uploading human minds into computers, allowing us to achieve not only true immortality and unlimited increases in intelligence, but also a vastly-richer sensory and sensual existence. There's the further possibility (far more speculative) that subsequent technological advances will allow us to bring back people who have died. The desire to achieve this, and hence the willingness to invest in the necessary research, will certainly be very strong. Loved ones we thought lost forever could be with us once more. The great geniuses of the past could live and create again. And why should any person miss out on the infinite possibilities of the post-Singularity world just because he or she had the poor luck to be born a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years before it was achieved?

All of that is obvious enough. But what about the problem of evil?

The question is bound to arise eventually. The human drive for justice will make it seem especially worthwhile to restore those whose lives were cut short by murder, whether by small-time predators or by the great mass killers of history. But what about those killers? For justice means more than merely making the innocent whole. It means punishing the guilty.

The time will come when the monsters of the past, from the least to the greatest, will be dragged forth from the oblivion into which they thought they had escaped, to stand before the bar of history -- and face the testimony of their victims.