Preventing lawful and decent burial

Preventing a lawful and decent burial of a dead body is a rather unusual offence at common law in England and Wales and in Northern Ireland.

Shona Jones and Muireann Quigley argued in ‘Preventing lawful and decent burial: resurrecting dead offences’ (2016) Legal Studies 36 (2) 354-374 that there is little justification or need for criminalising the prevention of burial per se, that the historical context of the need to regulate the disposal of corpses is no longer relevant, and that though acts which intentionally impeded the administration of justice are rightly criminal, other offences already deal more appropriately with the mischief addressed by the common law offence. Continue reading