The penalty for necrophilia doesn’t seem that severe, at least in Ohio. There was a morgue worker in Cincinnati who admitted performing sex acts with up to 100 corpses*, and he only wound up with a six-year prison sentence.
*contrary to popular belief, “Sex Acts With Up To 100 Corpses” was not the title of Rob Zombie’s first film.
Winston-McCauley Funeral Home ad: https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/funeral-home/2859830?snl=1
Oh, and I seriously have to wonder where the OP is getting statistics on a million (or more) different acts of necrophilia.
I don’t understand how this incentivizes either crime. 99.9999% of the time, murder is punished more severely than rape. If the rapist murders the victim to keep the victim quiet, that entails a worse penalty than rape. If the criminal has sex with a corpse, why would there be the claim, “The victim was *not *dead when I had sex?”, implying there was murder involved? If the murderer raped *and *murdered the victim, then it makes little sense to worry about the legal penalties for rape, when you have an even heavier charge - homicide - to worry about being convicted on. The rape charge is almost redundant in that instance; murder without rape is punished pretty much the same as murder with rape.
OK, suppose that you find a corpse dumped in the woods, with semen in the bodily orifices. The corpse itself is the primary piece of evidence. The natural conclusion is that some sicko raped and then murdered the victim. The police DNA test the semen, and find a match. But the defendant claims “I was just out hiking in the woods when I found the corpse and had sex with it. I don’t know who killed her.”
I really don’t buy this idea that blanket criminalization of necrophilia as equivalent to rape is justified, just to make it easier to prosecute rapist/murderers.
The moral aspect. Let’s say that, by the reasoning you outline above, necrophilia always attracts the same sentence as rape, even though we agree that the sentence is not justified by the act itself. Suppose a true necrophiliac digs up a long-dead body to do his thing, when it’s absolutely certain that he could not have killed the person. Should we punish him for a crime that he could possibly have committed, just to make it easier to prosecute unrelated cases? Blackstone’s Formulation has always been a fundamental principle of our justice system.
The pragmatic aspect. How frequently has an accused rapist/murderer used the necrophilia defense that you outline? It seems highly implausible to me. Isn’t it far more likely that the accused would claim to have had consensual sex with the victim earlier that night, but did not subsequently murder her? Either way, surely it’s up to the trial process (including the rest of the forensic evidence) to determine whether the defense is credible.
One scumbag who tried this defence was Mark Dixie
It does not state this in the link, however he treid to claim this very thing - you’ll find more about this toad around the net
But he was still convicted of murder. So, presumably, the system worked as it should - the jury did not find the defense credible. Based the Wiki article, he had no history of necrophilia, but plenty of rape and violence.
Necrophilia is certainly weirder than rape or murder, but I doubt most people would consider it even remotely equally evil.
I question the premise as well. I don’t think that most people consider necrophilia worse than murder or raping a living victim.
However, I do think that most people consider any kind of corpse desecration to be criminal. I don’t know if it’s true, but I have heard about some medical students who were dismissed for posing anatomy corpses in amusing ways, with costume pieces, and photographing them. This may be an urban legend, but my point in telling it is that I have heard this story told several times, and never once has anyone ever said the punishment was too severe; on the other hand, if anyone has said anything, it’s usually that they should have faced criminal charges.
Cemetery vandalism is taken pretty seriously too. It’s a victimless crime, more or less, in a way that crimes against property being used by the living are not, but it really upsets people.
I think corpses, like babies and very disabled people, represent a state of humanity that cannot defend itself. Nevermind that they also cannot feel, or have any idea of what is happening to them, and never will, and that the body will decay away pretty soon, unlike other helpless people. There is still an impulse to protect. It is irrational, but there it is.
*I love the dead before they’re cold
Their bluing flesh for me to hold
Cadaver eyes upon me see
Nothing
I love the dead before they rise
No farewells, no goodbyes
I never even knew your rotting face
While friends and lovers mourn your silly grave
I have other uses for you, darling
…*
So at least one notable human being is not exactly shocked by the idea.
So lets look at it for a moment.
First thought? Gross, repulsive.
Why?
Because it’s dead, dead stuff is creepy/ smelly/ slimy/ scary.
Even the coroner will agree, dead bodies stink.
But beyond that, what is there actually?
Be you Jew, Christian, Muslin, Atheist, insert belief here, i think most of us will agree that the lump of formaldehyde smelling “meat in the box” there is no longer me.
I have left the building, me and Elvis are going to pick up a 6 pack and go hang out with Buddy Holley.
And since that aint me in the box, you can not say that the person has actually harmed or violated me.
Unless you also subscribe to the belief that i am trapped in a dead body stuck in a box, in which case i have more horrible things than uninvited sex to look forward to, like ROTTING?
Ok, so far the person is guilty of having sex with a piece of no longer living meat in an undescribed state of decomposition.
What does the law prescribe as the punishment being being “Eww Yuck” ?
Because you simply can not punish the person for violating me, i was not there.
I can not be violated when i am not there to violate right?
Now, we may have some minor things to work through.
How did he get me? Did he dig me up?
Well that probably is trespassing, and criminal damaging?
I am not sure if taking the body is theft per se?
I do not know how the law sees a human body as far as property?
I am a person, i can not be owned, so technically no one can own by body.
But i have abandoned it, and abandoned property can be claimed.
So being that ive abandoned my body and am not around to say Sod off my body, no one gets it, there might be something there to charge.
But none of these things are the necrophilia itself where the crime exists.
Now it goes with out saying, you can not have caused my demise to pork my dead corpse because that has it’s own obvious crime.
So let us say that weird guy just found me lying around, i dropped dead on a bench in the woods somewhere.
He has his fun, and leaves me otherwise as he found me.
What harm has he caused that was not to himself?
The Rapist, the Murderer, we know what harm they have caused.
They definitely had victims, the victim was alive and inhabiting the body at the time.
The victim felt many unpleasant things during the violation.
Me, dead guy on a bench? Not so much, i already left the building, i was not present as the scene of my “violation”
So if i am not there, i can not really be violated, can i?
So if i can not be violated, hurt or harmed in any way, is it really justice to put the act on the same level as say a Rape or a Murder?
Justice is to be blind, fair, impartial is it not?
Devoid of the things that would vary widely from one person to the next so that you have one simple and fair justice for all people.
Making the act on par with the others both lessens the others, and reinjects those personal feelings back into the equation again.
No, i am not advocating “Return of the Living Corpse Porkers” or opening Cold Ethel’s Corpse Ranch in Vegas.
Though i think i could get Alice to do an opening night show
Necrophilia is really ‘Ewww’ because it involves two subjects that are taboo or controversial in nearly all societies: Sex and Death. Either of them is an exciting item, and subject of many legal controls, social inhibitions & traditions, and individual & family attitudes.
And necrophilia involves both of them! Really disturbing.
But I agree with many here that it isn’t “worse” in a legal sense – the penalties are lower than for many other criminal acts.
To be clear, I never said that that rationale was morally justified (that’s a GD question, anyway, not GQ). I said that that was in fact the rationale behind anti-necrophilia laws, in jurisdictions where they exist. I take no stance on the morality of the question.
Dispute the premise, etc.
I think part of it is that most people can sorta imagine being a rapist or murderer if somehow their moral inhibition units malfunctioned. Getting rid of an inconvenient person is practical. Sex whenever you like is nice.
But for necrophilia, I think it’s hard for most people to imagine the kind of brain state needed to make that desirable. You’re talking much lower-level mechanisms related to the things we find disgusting. Never mind that it’s a much milder morality violation; it pegs the gross-meter and that overrides the rest.
The disgust element is huge, of course.
But setting that aside, the paraphilia itself seems far less weird and incomprehensible to me than many others. After all, at least the object of attraction bears some resemblance to a conventional sexual partner.
On the other hand, most people don’t feel any discomfort at all in being in the same room as, handling, etc., a watermelon or whatever. But most people do feel discomfort at doing the same things with a corpse, even without the sex angle.
Interesting. I think you’re right.
On one hand, I don’t really care what happens to my body after I’m dead, except that I want them to take any parts that might be useful to someone else. On the other hand, my body is special to me - it may just be a meat shell, but it’s the one I’ve been using for 46 years, and I’d prefer to have it treated with respect. Using it as a fleshlight is NOT treating it with respect.
But having my corpse violated would be preferable to a still-living person being raped or murdered.