If the dead body is of a family member in your own house, then, yes, there’s a chance that you’ll be railroaded into a murder conviction even if you’re actually innocent. You’ll call 911 anyway (I mean, are you sure your kid/spouse/whoever is dead and not just badly injured? 911 dispatches ambulances and paramedics as well as police).
And obviously a mother who finds the dead bodies of her own children in her own house can’t exactly just “walk away”, as you advised above.
Any examples of a person finding the body of a stranger in a public place and being railroaded into a conviction? (Or even just railroaded into an expensive and life-altering trial.) The railroaded part doesn’t have to be a certainty; even just a case where a lot of people think the defendant was just some guy who found the body of a stranger in some public place, but the corrupt/incompetent/fascist cops decided to pin it on the poor guy.
It’s nice to have attorney’s in my immediate family. Neither are specialized in criminal law but the firm my brother is with certainly has defense attorneys available should I need one.
A month or so after my mom moved to Manhattan, she found a body in the East River. And it was exactly like a L&O episode. They asked her a few questions, and that was it.
(Well, except that they lost the body before they could recover it. When they found it a couple months later, they visited my mom again, went over her statement again, and she didn’t hear anything about it after that. )
The notion that she would have done anything but call the cops is absurd.
Go through their pockets for identification ( you can keep anything you find, they ain’t gonna be using it ).
Call their family to explain they won’t be home for Christmas.
This can be shorthand for one’s family lawyers. Carruthers and Jennings gave been with our people for nearly two centuries now, covering everything from estate management to accusations of murder; they are almost like family themselves. They still bill us in guineas. If they bother to bill us at all — when lawyers reach a certain relationship, half friend, half retainer, with valued clients, they no longer care about money.
“Mrs. Bean? Hi. Lt. Davis with the NYPD. Listen, remember when we came by a few months ago after you found that body? Yes, it was smelly. Yes, we do thank you for not poking it with a stick. Listen. When my partner and I left, do you recall if we took the body with us? What’s that? On the roof, you say. Ok, boy, that really slipped my mind. Thanks a bunch, Mrs. Bean. We’ll check the area where we made that first turn.”
It is going to be very difficult to answer the OP with a strictly factual answer, and as one might expect, the answers so far have involved opinions (and in some cases haven’t really been appropriate for GQ). I think it’s best to move this one over to IMHO.
Moving thread from General Questions (where the body was found) to In My Humble Opinion.
To answer OP’s question that hasn’t actually been answered yet:
Yes, if you find a stiff, you are obligated to report it. Failing to do so is a crime. At least in some places. One reads news articles from time to time of someone getting charged with the crime of failing to report a dead body.
No I don’t. You fail reasoning. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It is far more likely that someone else did it but the CSI team didn’t find definite traces of that someone (maybe they were wearing gloves and just didn’t leave traces in a spot that could be found) than she stabbed and bruised herself and left drops of her own blood a hundred meters from the house (what did she do, run over there while stabbed?)
If that isn’t reasonable doubt, the right to such doubt does not exist.
This is one of those things that “everybody knows” that just ain’t so. In some jurisdictions, you’re NOT supposed to call the police, but rather the county coroner.
Does Colorado state law actually say or imply that if you find a dead body and don’t personally notify the county coroner that you’re guilty of “misprision of finding a dead body” or some such thing? That FAQ question could just as easily mean that if a person finds a corpse and then calls the cops like a good citizen, the cops have some legal obligation to call the Coroner’s Office and say “Yeah, we got another stiff”. (Or more likely fill out some form in triplicate.)
What do you mean by the legally best thing to do?
Really this seems to be a situation of moral value. Do you want to ensure this person is found (considering family turmoil) or do you care less? Most likely you aren’t the only person to have seen the body and if you are indeed the first it won’t be long before another person discovers it.
Yeah, the truck driver that found the body of the Lindbergh baby went into the woods to take a piss. I’m sure that many bodies are found just by accident. Well, maybe not “many”, but it does happen.