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Law bans sex with , corpseI Iigh court reinstates 'charges against 3 men JAssociated PressMADISONWisconsin law bans sex with dead bodies, the state Supreme Court ruled Wednesday in reinstating charges against three men accused of digging up a corpse to have sex with it.The court waded into the grisly case after lower court judges ruled nothing in state law banned necrophilia. Those decisions prompted public outrage in Wisconsin and on the Internet, where one blogger wrote: “Doing the dirty with the dead OK in Wisconsin.”Not anymore, the court ruled in a 5-2 decision.Justice Patience Roggen-sack, writing a majority opinion with three other justices, said state law bans sexual intercourse with anyone who does not give consent whether a victim is dead or alive at the time. Dead bodies obviously can’t give consent, she said.“A reasonably well-informed person would understand the statute to prohibit sexual intercourse with a dead person,” she wrote.The decision brings Wisconsin’s law in line with more than 20 other states who prohibit necrophilia or the abuse of a corpse. The law in Wisconsin had been murky, and two dissenting justices insisted Wednesday that lawmakers did not mean to ban necrophilia but to allow assault charges when someone was raped and then killed.The ruling reinstates attempted sexual assault charges against twin brothers Nicholas and Alexander Grunke and Dustin Radke, all 22. They face up to 10 years in prison if convicted.Armed with shovels, a crowbar and a box of condoms, the men went to a cemetery in Cassville in southwestern Wisconsin in 2006 to remove the body of a 20-year-old woman killed the week before in a motorcycle crash, police said.One of them had seen an obituary photo of the pretty nursing assistant and asked the others for help digging up her corpse so he could have sexual intercourse with it, prosecutors said. They used the shovels to reach her grave but were unable to pry the concrete vault open and fled after a car drove into the cemetery.
Newspaper Details
Janesville Gazette
Janesville, Wisconsin, US
Thu, Jul 10, 2008
Page 7
Full Page
Clipped by
Jim C.
NA, 16 Apr 2024
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