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Somethig you can't do in CALIFORNIA
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - 9/2004
Having sex with corpses is now officially illegal in California after Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger 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.
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