When I die, I don’t really care what happens to me. Could my family throw me into a ditch or something with no legal recourse?
Most states (I can’t say for sure about Alabama) has strict laws for disposal of a corpse. See an attorney for your paticular situation.
Zev Steinhardt
Almost certainly your family could abandon your body or refuse to accept responsibility for it, and someone - probably the local sanitary authority - would arrange disposal of it (which would probably be a cheap but conventional disposal, such a cremation with no service). They might or might not then pursue your estate (if you leave one) to recover the cost.
Well, you could always have this place take care of your remains. Sounds like you’d get your wish.
RR
Well, as the old saying goes, friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
You could always have them dump you someplace where it’d be unlikely anyone would find your remains for several years and not have to worry about them getting busted. They could dump you off in a dilapilated abandoned house out in the country someplace, under a pile of rubble, or in the Canadian Wilderness. Since you weren’t murdered or reported missing, no one would be trying to find you…AND you’ve got the added bonus of being an unsolved mystery case if you are discovered. If I weren’t going to be bronzed and brought out of storage for family gatherings, I’d go the abandoned house route.
Donate your body to science.
Quick, easy and doing good.
Auburn, AL is ± 200 miles from the sea by my calculations.
Have your survivors drive your body down to the coast, then hire a boat, and take you out into international waters (IIRC, the current statute is “11 miles out”). Then they can dump you in, where the sharks will make pretty quick work of your remains.
I suspect not.
The dumping of waste at sea is controlled even beyond territorial waters.
(Of course, in practice they might get away with it. But the OP asks about “legal recourse”.)
CITE?
This may be off the coast of Alabama but up here in New England it is much farther than that. Why standing on the beach near my house we can see in a straight line to Ledge Light House which is 22 miles from shore…and certainly not in international waters.
Plus Coast Guard new rules say tankers must sit inside USA waters for 96 hours before making landfall. Precautionary measures, nuff said.
A floating lighthouse?
Well, this is a bit OT, but, speaking very broadly, you have your territorial seas (12 nautical miles), your contiguous zone (24 nautical miles, your exclusive economic zone (200 nautical miles) and your continental shelf (determined by geography). Everything outside that is the High Seas or the Area (the sea-bed underneat the High Seas).
Littoral states have varying levels of rights to control what goes on in these different regions. The High Seas and the Area are regulated (or not) by international treaties.
Just to confuse matters, all of the above comes from the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas, which the United States has not yet signed and ratified. The US may, therefore, take a differnt view of where its territorial seas, contiguous zone and exclusive economic zone lie than the convention suggests - I have no idea. I also have no idea in which of these zones, if any, the US permits the dumping of stiffs.
Part of what makes dumping a body difficult, even if the death is completely natural, is that the authorities have an interest in preventing it; when unidentified human remains are found it generates a drain on public resources - it may look like the aftermath of a murder even if that isn’t the case and therefore police and pathologists will be involved, not to mention the public health issues.
Not to mention that there are very strict rules in disposing of corpses in general for sanitary/public health reasons and to regulate cemetaries (no double stacking even of ashes in many areas, etc)
Um… first of all, where do you plan to die? Most people croak in hospitals. If that’s the case, simply have your relatives refuse to claim the body… or better yet, arrange to have it donated to a medical school. They never have enough stiffs, and it’s free.
If you croak somewhere ELSE, it’s often a police matter, and once the situation is cleared up that you weren’t murdered, your body will likely be in a morgue. Since an autopsy might be done to determine how you died, and so forth, your body will be less desirable for dissection purposes.
I’d make a point of croaking in a hospital, if I were you.