No Thanks, I'll Eat It Here

Reason contributor A.S. Hamrah, the artist formerly known as Slotcar Hatebath, hips us to the nanny state's latest infringement on our precious liberties: It is now illegal to have sexual congress with a corpse in the state of California. Sez Reuters:

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.

David Raclin of The Press-Enterprise (reg. req.) has more detail on the case of the molested four-year old:

The law, AB1493, was named Robyn's Law for Robyn Erin Gillett, a 4-year-old Adelanto girl who died Feb. 12, 2003 after having a seizure. Her body was molested later that day at the San Bernardino County morgue.

The lack of a statute outlawing necrophilia became an issue after sheriff's detectives arrested Donald Cooper, 32, and Chaunee Helm, 30, who worked for a company that had a contract to transport bodies to the county morgue.

Since California had no law prohibiting sex with a corpse at the time of the crime, the two suspects were charged with mutilating a dead body, a violation of the Health and Safety Code.

"We went to the district attorney's office and said we wanted to get (arrest) warrants," said San Bernardino County Sheriff Gary Penrod in March 2003. "We had trouble finding a law that was specific to what they had done."

Cooper pled guilty to a felony and was given a two-year suspended sentence with five years on supervised probation. He was ordered to attend a sex-offender treatment program. Helm, who served as a lookout, pled guilty to a misdemeanor.

Obviously, neither a corpse nor a four-year-old can provide consent, but if you leave permission in your will for your lonesome spouse or S.O. to have one last fling with your mortal coil, shouldn't the state of California respect your wishes?

Actually, I don't really care about this issue, but I think it's important to get ahead of (or proudly embrace) the inevitable epithet: "Dirty, corpse-fucking libertarians."