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PaperclipPerfector
4d ago
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Notes -
Court opinion:
On August 31: A person dies; his brother contacts a funeral home and requests a direct cremation, with no embalming; and the corpse is brought to the funeral home. On September 2, the brother signs a contract for cremation at a price of 3.4 k$, and the corpse is transferred to a crematory.
On September 7: The brother signs a contract with a different funeral home for cremation at a price of just 1 k$. The corpse is transported from the crematory back to the first funeral home. When the second funeral director arrives at the first funeral home to pick up the corpse, she is astonished to discover that the first funeral home failed to refrigerate the corpse because its corpse refrigerator was out of order! After sitting at 56 °F (11 °C) for three days before being transferred to the crematory, the corpse has generated "fluid seepage, maggot infestation, and unbearable decay and stench". Since then the broken fridge has been replaced, but the damage already has been done. The second funeral director reports the situation to the brother.
On September 10, the second funeral home has the corpse cremated. However, before cremation, the brother insists on seeing the corpse one last time. He is appalled at its condition, and reports the situation to the police. The first funeral director—who also is the president of the
<del>state</del><ins>county</del>funeral directors' association!—is charged with abuse of a corpse, is convicted, and is sentenced to a year of probation. "If the President of the Funeral Directors' Association conducts business in this manner, who is to say what is happening at any other funeral home behind a family's back?"The convicted funeral director appeals. He argues that the crime of abuse of a corpse is reserved for (1) acts, while he only omitted an act, and (2) treatment that the actor "knows would outrage ordinary family sensibilities", while he had no such knowledge. But the appeals panel affirms. (1) "The purpose of drafting the abuse-of-corpse statute in very broad and general language was to ensure that offenses such as concealing a corpse came under the purview of the statute." It is precedent that failing to notify authorities of a person's death and allowing that person's corpse to rot counts as abuse of a corpse, even though it is merely the omission of an act rather than an act in itself. (2) "Even if there were no initial expectation that the family would ever see Decedent's body again, any person, funeral director or otherwise, would understand that family sensibilities would be offended if a corpse were allowed to decompose for days."
This got a decent amount of play in the Pittsburgh news earlier this year. If you want to make the story come to life and meet some of the people involved, there's this video reporting on the guilty verdict, and this one covering the preliminary hearing.
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