“Murder defendant Dean Eric Dunlap’s lawyer raised a necrophilia defense in closing arguments, telling jurors his client may have had sex with the body of a 9-year-old girl but didn’t kill the child. Dunlap, 47, is charged with kidnapping, raping and killing Sandra Astorga, who disappeared Jan. 10, 1992, while walking to school. The body was found 20 days later in a field. ‘People can do unspeakable things to a dead body. Maybe Mr. Dunlap did unspeakable things,’ Deputy Public Defender Teresa Snodgrass told jurors Monday. Deputy District Attorney Cheryl Kersey urged jurors to disregard the necrophilia defense and asked them to consider the trail of DNA evidence on the girl and her scattered belongings that pointed to Dunlap. DNA testing led to Dunlap’s arrest in 2000.” —Mercury News (US)

Jurors needed almost no time to return a guilty verdict in this case, so obviously this “necrophilia defense” wasn’t much of a defense at all. Nor should it have been. Think about it for a minute. Consider what the guy’s lawyer was really saying. “My client,” he implied, “did not kill this little girl. No, he was just wandering around out in a field, stumbled on her dead body, and did the sort of ‘unspeakable’ thing to it that happens to leave DNA evidence all over the poor girl’s young flesh.”

Wow. That is some crazy last-ditch effort on the part of legal counsel to throw a Hail Mary pass. Evidently the idea is to replace the violent crime with an improbable, even insane act of sexual deviance. After all, it’s better to be convicted of “abuse of corpse” than of murder. (Why don’t they call it “creation of corpse?”) But still, that’s a nutty argument — so nutty that you can almost hear the perp filing his appeal now, claiming an entirely new sort of insanity defense. “It wasn’t me who was insane, it was my lawyer!”

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