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This essay offers a critical rhetorical reading of the death of Ashley Smith, a young woman who died of positional asphyxia when she tied a ligature around her neck while being held in solitary confinement. Smith’s death was ruled a homicide by the jury in the coroner’s inquest and subsequently figured as a suicide in the Correctional Service of Canada’s published response to the inquest one year later. The equivocation over the precise cause of her death raises questions over the agency—or agencies—that were responsible for her death, whether directly or through systemic negligence. Drawing on Foucault’s theoretical and historical distinction between sovereign power and biopolitics, the authors argue that Smith’s death is a biopolitical effect of neoliberal correctional institutions. There is a ruse, however, in the way in which the Correctional Service of Canada has evaded responsibility: by invoking a sovereign legal prerogative over the lives placed in its care in an effort to conceal its biopolitical involvement.