Lilith
09-16-2004, 08:23 AM
(submitted by gekkogecko)
Reuters to
My Yahoo!
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Having sex with corpses is
now officially illegal in California after Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger (news - web sites) signed a bill
barring necrophilia, a spokeswoman said on Friday.
The new legislation marks the culmination of a
two-year drive to outlaw necrophilia in the state and
will help prosecutors who have been stymied by the
lack of an official ban on the practice, according to
experts.
"Nobody knows the full extent of the problem. ... But
a handful of instances over the past decade is
frequent enough to have a bill concerning it," said
Tyler Ochoa, a professor at Santa Clara University
School of Law who has studied California cases
involving allegations of necrophilia.
"Prosecutors didn't have anything to charge these
people with other than breaking and entering. But if
they worked in a mortuary in the first place,
prosecutors couldn't even charge them with that,"
Ochoa said.
The state's first attempt to outlaw necrophilia, in
response to a case of a man charged with having sex
with the corpse of a 4-year-old girl in Southern
California, stalled last year in a legislative
committee.
Lawmakers revived the bill this year after an
unsuccessful prosecution of a man found in a San
Francisco funeral home drunk and passed out on top of
an elderly woman's corpse.
The new law makes sex with a corpse a felony
punishable by up to eight years in prison.
Reuters to
My Yahoo!
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Having sex with corpses is
now officially illegal in California after Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger (news - web sites) signed a bill
barring necrophilia, a spokeswoman said on Friday.
The new legislation marks the culmination of a
two-year drive to outlaw necrophilia in the state and
will help prosecutors who have been stymied by the
lack of an official ban on the practice, according to
experts.
"Nobody knows the full extent of the problem. ... But
a handful of instances over the past decade is
frequent enough to have a bill concerning it," said
Tyler Ochoa, a professor at Santa Clara University
School of Law who has studied California cases
involving allegations of necrophilia.
"Prosecutors didn't have anything to charge these
people with other than breaking and entering. But if
they worked in a mortuary in the first place,
prosecutors couldn't even charge them with that,"
Ochoa said.
The state's first attempt to outlaw necrophilia, in
response to a case of a man charged with having sex
with the corpse of a 4-year-old girl in Southern
California, stalled last year in a legislative
committee.
Lawmakers revived the bill this year after an
unsuccessful prosecution of a man found in a San
Francisco funeral home drunk and passed out on top of
an elderly woman's corpse.
The new law makes sex with a corpse a felony
punishable by up to eight years in prison.