Victimless Crime?

If an action is deeply disgusting, does that mean it’s criminal?

By Bryan Zepp Jamieson

9/14/04

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/necro.htm

A friend of mine in Texas emailed me a link with the question, "Was this a PROBLEM in California?" After stopping to assure him that there are no problems in California, I read the article, a Reuters story.

It seems that necrophilia is now illegal in California. In truth, I hadn’t been aware that it wasn’t illegal, and just assumed that it was. Like speed limits in Albania or rules of grammar in Swahili, it didn’t seem particularly germane to my daily life, and I hadn’t really thought about it before.

It seems some guy got caught buggering the corpse of a four year old girl. It seems to me that just getting caught doing something like that is bad enough. It isn’t the sort of thing you want to have to put on your resume or see in your credit report, after all.

So they arrested him, but when it came to filing charges, they ran into a little snag. There was no law against sex with the dead. This includes former minors, since the good and righteous laws that protect children are at this point moot.

So they settled with charging the guy with – I’m not making this up – breaking and entering. Apparently he had to break into a mortuary to molest the corpse. The judge, presumably, gave him a stiff sentence.

Now, the prosecuting attorney in that case might want make certain word of the story behind the minor offence of B&E got back to the staff at the prison, and perhaps from there, it might make it to the other inmates. Yes, that would be highly unprofessional. But in cases with really strange extralegal features like this, things like that tend to happen. If you got sent up for tax-evasion and your cellmate was in for B&E, wouldn’t YOU want to know if there was more to the story?

But word got back to the California legislature, which is forever seeking ways to justify its existence short of actually showing up and doing its job. Everyone agreed that having sex with the corpse of a four year old girl was pretty appalling, but nobody seemed very inclined to press for a change in the law to criminalize necrophilia. No word on whether the Prison Guard Union, which owns Arnie and owned the Grey guy before him, lobbied against a law that would basically give necrophiliacs a free pass into the state prisons. The guards, after all, have come to expect a certain bottom level among the inmates, and a kiddy korpse brigade seemed to fall short of that undemanding level of probity.

So necrophilia remained, if not legal, not illegal in California. You can’t dig a corpse up, you can’t steal a corpse, you can’t mutilate one, but you can bone one. You don’t even have to be a corporation.

But then funeral home workers came in one morning in SF last year to find a guy named Mahdi Allah passed out drunk, pants around his knees, on the corpse of an elderly woman.

If that strikes you as an odd position for a man whose name translates roughly to "prophet of God" to be in, go read your old Testament. Job is a good place to start. As prophets of God go, Mahdi wasn’t all that far out of the mainstream. At least he didn’t kill a bunch of kids for making fun of his baldness, for example. Even necrophiliacs have standards.

So they scoured the penal code, determined that they could get Mahdi on stolen property – he heisted a key to the mortuary – and two misdemeanor counts of trespass. Prosecuting attorneys found this curiously unsatisfying.

What’s more, they were horrified to discover that cases of necrophilia cropped up several times a decade among California’s population of 34 million people. Obviously, something needed to be done before a new fad started! Suppose Mel Gibson decided to make another religious movie?

So now in California, necrophilia is against the law, and is punishable by up to eight years in prison.

I can’t help but wonder how many beleaguered husbands of frigid wives are excitedly calling their lawyers and asking if this new law gives them a divorce case loophole around California’s community property laws. After all, a contract that compels a party to commit criminal acts is, on the face of it, invalidated.

On a more serious note, I wonder if this law is necessary, valid, or serves any reasonable purpose.

It’s pretty unlikely that necrophilia is ever going to become a fad, even among the goth kids. Like self-immolation, it’s so extreme that it will never become a problem. The folks pressing to make it a felony were only able to come up with three instances state-wide over the previous decade.

The legality of the law is another problem. The dead can’t have their civil rights violated, because the dead don’t have civil rights. Obviously, the kin of the corpses are going to suffer enormous pain and anguish, and they would certainly have grounds to file under civil law against the perpetrator.

Is the public interest served? Not really. The act of necrophilia is disgusting to nearly everyone, which is why it is so rare. Even on the web, where one can find any variety of perversions up to and including snuff films, necrophilia is hidden. (Granted, I didn’t look very hard).

One of the big social problems we have is the large number of people in jail for actions that, upon examination, aren’t really criminal. Pot use, for example. California spends billions incarcerating people for "crimes" that shouldn’t be considered criminal, and the "three strikes" law, which mandates 25 to life for third offenses, makes it far worse, with the result that we have lifers who stole a slice of pizza, or a bicycle, or in one case, were in possession of half a marijuana joint.

Just because an action is disgusting doesn’t mean it should be criminal. Let civil law protect the relatives of the deceased, and let existing property laws protect the mortuaries and graveyards.