Committee approves amended draft that creates aggravated penalty for abuse of a dead body

The House Judiciary Committee voted to approve draft 4.1 (a strike‑all amendment) to a bill criminalizing certain mistreatment of a deceased person’s body, consolidating and clarifying offenses and increasing penalties for aggravated conduct.

Ben Novogratzky, legislative counsel, told the committee the revised draft reorganizes prior language and narrowed the statute to require a specific intent element for certain conduct. Under the amended draft, subsection (b) would prohibit intentionally burying, transporting, hiding and concealing, burning, mutilating, disfiguring, dismembering or destroying “the dead body of a person” when done for the purpose of concealing a crime or avoiding apprehension, prosecution or conviction. Novogratzky said that conduct, with the specified intent, would be covered in the new felony provision even where separate public‑health statutes (for example those regulating burial…