OOP Spoilers--my defense of Harry (long!)

[alakefullmoon]

> So lets move on to the end.  Sirius dies.  I think he's dead.  
Dead.  JKR said it already, the person was definitely dead.  So if 
he's not she's lied at some point.  Either by saying he's definitely 
dead, or previously by saying no one could be brought back from the 
dead in the WW.  

You know legal stuff? that clever lawyers could get through the gaps 
in it without doing anything illegal? Here we go:
-We could say that any ghost at hogwarts its definitely dead, couldnt 
we?
-We know no ghost or spirit has ever come back from being dead.
 --- but ther´s a gap, you could not be gone but not be alive, and 
that intermediate state is where ghosts are. I already explained why 
I think this (somewhere in the older posts, labelled as "Oooh that 
twisted woman...").
So, Rowling rarelly does things without a meaning unless red herrings 
of course. and don´t you find Sirius´s dead, let´s say, peculiar? No 
body, no killing curse (for all we know he was hitted by a red light, 
stupefy) and falling through that funny veil (which some have pointed 
out has something to do with being the door from this world to the 
next). -too many hints, she wants us to realize something dodgy is 
going on. And do you think she is twisted enough to keep open the 
possibility of seing some kind of sirius "alive"? She made Cedrics 
dead very clear, but not sirius.