hmmmmmm - is this Republicans trying to pose as compasionate conservatives? Also makes you wonder if anyone voted against this and why.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - 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.
Letter to the Editor
It's been 3 years since Osama bin Laden destroyed the World Trade Towers and killed 3000 people. Bush said that bin Laden was wanted "Dead or Alive" he was going to "Smoke him out". But now Bush says bin Laden has been "marginalized" and Bush says. "I truly am not that concerned about him." Bush has let him get away with murdering 3000 people and is no longer pursuing him. Yet America remains in terror of being attacked by bin Laden again.
Seems to me that if Bush were serious about terrorism - he'd be going after the terrorists. We need a president who knows who the real enemy is and will go after those who really did attack us. This is the third anniversary of both a tragedy and Bush's continuing failure to deal with it.