Had sex with dead bodies, ordered to pay $2.45 million

Discussion in 'Law & Justice' started by kazenatsu, Mar 18, 2023.

  1. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    This man had sex with dead bodies that had been put under his care. Yes, he should have gone to prison.
    But here's the problem I have with this story. The government has ordered that he have to pay $2,450,000 dollars to the families of bodies he defiled (well, three of the families).

    A former morgue worker, 55-year-old Kenneth Douglas was convicted of sexually molesting a murder victim's body. The sexual violation would have taken place 26 years earlier before he was convicted. DNA evidence showed that Douglas had sex with the body of a 19-year-old young woman at the Hamilton county morgue where he worked, in Ohio.
    He was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

    The molestation of the corpse had been discovered in 1982, after the woman had died. A cleaning products salesman, David Steffen, was convicted for her aggravated murder and rape the following year but denied raping her. It would not be until the later widespread availability of DNA testing that authorities were able to determine there was a match to the morgue worker.

    Steffen had admitted to police that he beat, stabbed and killed the victim. He told them that he attempted to rape her but could not get an erection. Later, he was unable to explain why semen had been found inside the victim's body, who was purported to be a virgin.
    Because the body showed evidence of sexual violation, in 1983 a jury decided that Steffen was lying about having raped the young woman. He was sentenced to the death penalty.
    Steffen attempted to appeal the conviction for rape, but the appellate courts agreed with the jury.
    However finally, 26 years later in 2009, with the new DNA evidence, and the presumption that he had been wrongly convicted of rape rather than attempted rape, a judge decided to hold a near hearing to reconsider the punishment. In 2016 the judge resentenced Steffen to life in prison without possibility of parole.

    Kenneth Douglas was later sentenced to an additional 3 years for the violation of two other female homicide victims from 1991.

    While Kenneth Douglas was in prison, the families of the three bodies he had been convicted of sexually violating started a lawsuit against him. Being in prison can make it more difficult for someone to be able to defend themself in a lawsuit.

    In a court deposition Douglas admitted that he had brutally raped and assaulted up to 100 different female corpses waiting to be autopsied during his nearly two decades working at the morgue. Douglas claimed he was struggling with addiction at the time and would never have done this if he was sober.

    The judge issued a default judgement against Douglas, in 2015. So now Kenneth Douglas is obligated to have to give these families $2,450,000 dollars.

    Not that he even has that much money, but this is going to make him financially destitute when he gets out of prison. It's almost like a life sentence, punishment for life.

    I have several issues with this. First, yes, it may be understandable to send someone to prison for sexually violating dead bodies, but to make them have to pay lots of money for that crime, as punishment?
    Maybe I'm wrong, but this seems like a new idea, a newer development in American legal doctrine. I don't think it worked like this 100 years ago. Is this really how things should be?
    It's not just a moderate amount of money, like a fine. This is a huge amount of money.
    There were no actual financial damages, so how is ordering financial compensation justified?
    And should the family even be entitled to get money? I mean, the wrong wasn't actually committed against them; they were not the victims.

    Another issue is apparently there was not enough evidence to charge this suspect with the crime of violating the other bodies. But the burden of evidence in a lawsuit (a civil case) is much lower than a criminal case.
    Because he was convicted of one crime, he is just going to be assumed guilty of other similar crimes? They only know that he had violated lots of bodies because he willingly told them.

    On top of that, those three families were already given an $800,000 settlement from the county. In my opinion in one way that is even worse. Why should taxpayer money have to be paid out? The county was not really "responsible" for the wrongdoing. The county was not the person who committed the crimes.
    And with the families already being given $800,000 in government money for this, did they really need another $2.45 million?

    In the lawsuit, the lawyer representing the county had asked the judge to block the jury from hearing about Kenneth Douglas's testimony of having violated more than 100 bodies.
    If so many bodies had been violated, it suggests other workers should have noticed signs that something was wrong.


    sources
    Corpse abuser sentenced, Fox19 News, September 30, 2008
    Corpse abuser sentenced (fox19.com)
    Death Penalty Case Reveals Morgue Worker Had Sex with 100 Female Corpses, September 2, 2016, Prison Legal News September, 2016, page 46
    Death Penalty Case Reveals Morgue Worker Had Sex with 100 Female Corpses | Prison Legal News
    Corpse Abuser Sentenced To 3 More Years In Prison, Feb 2, 2010, WLWT5
    Ohio: County wants to block testimony on sex with corpses, Feb 4, 2015, IndyStar
     
    Last edited: Mar 18, 2023
  2. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    LiveUninhibited likes this.
  3. LiveUninhibited

    LiveUninhibited Well-Known Member

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    Yuck... as somebody who has been around a lot of dead bodies... yuck. But yeah it's an odd sort of crime. There isn't much of a victim. I mean, a dead body is more object than person. It's disrespectful to their loved ones, and I don't think I'd legalize it, but I don't think I'd put heavy penalties on it either (like, misdemeanor put you in jail for no more than a year kind of thing) particularly so-called pain and suffering damages. I'd not really a fan of "pain and suffering" damages in general though.
     
    Last edited: Mar 22, 2023
  4. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    For anyone who thinks this lawsuit outcome was not absurd and insane, let's ask you this...
    Do you believe if a person has sex with a dead body, that person (in addition to prison time) should have to pay the father of that dead person $270,000 , the mother of that dead person $270,000 , and the brother of that dead person another $270,000 ?

    Because that's what this story amounts to.
    ($2.45 million divided by 3, for each family, and then divided by 3 again, assuming 3 family members)

    The average annual pay for a morgue assistant in Ohio is $37,600 a year, probably more like $23,000 after taxes.
    Just in case that helps put things into perspective.
     
  5. FreshAir

    FreshAir Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I think it hurts the loved ones, so yes, they are victims
     
  6. Jack Hays

    Jack Hays Well-Known Member Donor

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    Yes.
     
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  7. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    This isn't justice.
    This has to do with a mentality in society where a lot of people do not care what happens to someone who does something wrong and disgusting, and just assume that person deserves whatever they get, whatever punishment the courts meted out to them.
    Whether they get sentenced to 2 years or 20 years, no one cares.
    Or whether they are made to pay a thousand dollars or a million, no one cares. That's just how human psychology works.
    No one even seems to care much about exactly who the money goes to. Just so long as the offender is made to pay.
     
  8. MuchAdo

    MuchAdo Well-Known Member

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    Is it really possible to brutally rape and assault a dead person? It’s like attacking a lump of meat. It’s a really gross thing to do and I don’t believe ‘addiction’ is an excuse, more of a perversion, an attraction to dead bodies. The corpse has no feelings, the family does. Should they be paid millions for their emotional distress? I don’t think so. They won’t get paid from this guy either because he wouldn’t have the money. I believe the crime of necrophilia is a felony conviction with a term in jail of one to ten years. What do you do when you have a 100 defiled corpses — jail the man for life?
     
  9. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    But it would be likely to bankrupt him, taking away from him whatever house he owns, and condemning him to a life of poverty. Perhaps even homelessness.
    Imagine he can't even work without 70% of the money being taken out of his paycheck.
    Any retirement savings completely gone and confiscated.

    It seems pretty cruel and punitive. In some ways even crueler than just sentencing him to a few additional years of prison.
     
  10. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    You bring up a good and important legal point.
    But let's keep in mind we only know he defiled 100 corpses because he admitted to it and decided to tell the truth.
    I think authorities only had evidence for 3 of the corpses.
    I do find it a little bit distasteful to be punishing a person for crimes when we only know he committed those crimes because he told us.

    I also do not think an offender should have to pay extra money to the family of one victim because there were other victims.
    This is logical and should be common sense (in my personal opinion).
     
  11. FreshAir

    FreshAir Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    when you get caught for 3, you confess to the rest, so you can't be recharged for them in the future as new cases

    hardly a get out of punishment free card
     
    Last edited: Nov 9, 2023
  12. FreshAir

    FreshAir Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    yep, it sends a msg to others, not to have sex with corpses
     
  13. Jack Hays

    Jack Hays Well-Known Member Donor

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  14. MuchAdo

    MuchAdo Well-Known Member

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    It seems to me necrophilia is a mental illness. Perhaps a kinder justice system would have mandated treatment for his mental illness as well as rehab for his alcoholism and have him serve jail time for his crimes. As far as the families, no amount of money is going to change what happened. Perhaps they could use some psychological treatment rather than money to help them with their feelings.
     
  15. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I do not view this as a "mental illness". Many things can exist in a twilight zone between whether they are a mental illness or not (transgenderism being one example). I would say that it's not altogether logically indisputable that necrophilia (per se) clearly constitutes a "mental illness". However, it seems this man may have had what could be described as a subset category of sex addiction. Clearly his behavior was not acceptable and jeopardized his professional career. He may not have been able to "help himself", in the role he was in, with easy access to vulnerable dead female bodies that routinely appeared in front of him.
     
    Last edited: Nov 10, 2023
  16. Mushroom

    Mushroom Well-Known Member

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    And in this case, it is also contamination of a crime scene that might have seen somebody executed.

    And it does not matter how you view it, it is how the law views it.

     
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  17. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    That is a valid point. But, to be totally fair, I think we could argue about whether the contamination of the crime scene should have affected whether the person should be executed, in this particular story.

    We know that the perpetrator killed the victim in order to try to rape her. But does the fact that perpetrator was physically unable to rape the victim, even though the intention to rape her was there, mean that he should not get the death penalty?

    To make matters more complicated, some could argue it is not "fair" to execute a criminal for something he admits to doing, when the other available evidence is not strong enough to execute him. That was true in this case, when the DNA test long after the original conviction showed that the victim's dead body had been raped by a different individual.
     
    Last edited: Nov 23, 2023
  18. Mushroom

    Mushroom Well-Known Member

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    This has to get into the issues of "Special Circumstances" and how they can enhance a crime. Just killing another is not enough to get the Death Penalty, one has to have Special Circumstances in order to qualify for that. Premeditation, lying in wait, torture, rape, things of that nature along of course with killing multiple people.

    In this specific case, the rape was the special circumstance and why he was eligible in the first place. SO according to the law, no he was not eligible as he did not commit a special circumstance.

    This is not complicated, it is actually rather simple. During the autopsy, did the deceased show signs of rape? Yes, or no? He admitted he killed her, and that he intended to rape her. However, how often have we had other cases where somebody claimed they had done a crime, but not the part that was a Special Circumstance and therefore not eligible for the death penalty? Great example, the murder of James Byrd. Where three men kidnapped, beat, and tortured a man before chaining him to the back of their truck and dragging him for over three miles. Where pieces of his body were found scattered over three miles of highway.

    And to avoid the death penalty, they all admitted to the crime. Even admitting things like they had slit his throat before dragging his body (avoiding the torture special circumstance). Or claiming that Mister Byrd had either sexually propositioned them or tried to rob them, thereby avoiding special circumstances related to it being a racial based attack. So even while pleading guilty to murder, they were trying to avoid anything that would see them executed.

    Thankfully, it did not work as two of the three scumbags have been executed, and the third will not even be eligible for parole for another 15 years, and will likely die after spending most of his life in solitary confinement. And no, he is not kept like that as punishment, it is the only way to keep him alive as if he was ever allowed in GP his lifespan would likely be measured in minutes. Along with the law enforcement in jail and sex offenders that are locked up. But a hell of a lot of the time, criminals when facing the death penalty will suddenly outright confess to the crime, but at the same time state they are innocent of the special circumstances that would result in their being executed.
     

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