My Human Remains—and Yours
Sex, death, and cake decoration.
Criminal justice is a lot like a cake. It’s about substance. It’s about combining ingredients in their proper proportions so that a digestible result may come out. The batter produces a rich and moist sponge, just as the evidence brings about an efficient and fair redress. Because Person Q brought harm to Person F by doing Action 5, Person Q must be punished. Cake-eaters and society-dwellers go to bed nourished, though perhaps not completely.
Cake on its own is dry, and sometimes dull, filling the stomach at the expense of a strained palate. So icing is sought. Icing has its own necessary components, but is also thought of less. It is not relevant that the icing be chocolate or vanilla or lemon, or that it be buttercream-, cream cheese-, or fondant-based, or that it is called “frosting” instead. It’s simply there to let the sponge go down better and for us to appreciate its substance more fully. It doesn’t challenge our assumptions as to what sponge should be made of or that a different sort of sponge is possible. So it is with criminal justice and the style that frames its substance. The style is never more than a conceptualizing device for a society’s established attitudes, accentuating its customs and bringing delight to its people.
Yet a triviality towards style also assumes a high trust. The trust of a style in society, like the icing of a cake, should never go untested. I should like to do so with the help of two examples of crimes, both from recent history, with a shared place of occurrence, and enough overlap that they were addressed in much the same way.
In 2009, a 26-year-old New York man was sentenced by a New Jersey court to seven years in prison for the crime of desecrating human remains. The man was arrested two years prior having been caught tampering with the corpse of a 92-year-old woman in the morgue of the Teaneck hospital where he worked as a lab technician. The story spread rapidly throughout the state on account of the sexual nature of his tampering. It echoed an incident from the year before. Police had arrived at the South Plainfield home of a woman to conduct an unrelated welfare check only to find six human skulls and one severed human hand in a mason jar, named “Freddy,” all acquired by her through a medical student who’d stolen them. The medical student was later fined for his part; the woman was charged with improperly disposing of human remains and, as far as I can tell, was mandated with counseling. There was little apparent sexuality in the woman’s possession of the skulls and “Freddy,” yet the story spread just as rapidly in part due to her job at the time of her arrest: stripping on Route 22.
A cursory glance of both cases is likely to leave you repulsed and pleased with their outcomes. But hone your scope closer to their crevices and finer grains of detail become apparent. Primarily that they are subject not to a style but styles. The cake batter is the same yet it is covered by icing and frosting—not mixed together, but blending into each other. First you have the evidentiary style, which not only has all the facts, but has the proper arrangement of those facts. Consider the charges: “desecration of human remains" and “improperly disposing of human remains.” The importance of the former is the object desecrated; of the latter, the impropriety of the one disposing the object. And I say object because that seems to be what we are dealing with. They are important enough to be offended against and mishandled, but not so important as to be identified specifically, or at least by their original name. They didn’t even justify harsh sentences for the offenders.
That’s because with certain transgressions the second style is a weightier punishment than the first. This expository style has the same facts as the evidentiary, but prefers building upon them to arranging them. This gives them more facts at their disposal and a more flexible means of expressing them. The expression tends toward the atmospheric, embellishing the macabre accents of the incident and bringing the perpetrator to the center. The centrality is ironic as it is meant to emphasize their peripheral status. This is a different approach from how you’d read about the PTA treasurer who keeps delinquent teenagers in her basement to make brownies with their fat and bracelets with their teeth. It soothes rather than fascinates. You read such incidents and see clearly the distance you have from the morose lab technician and the morbid highway stripper and go back to your life with a non-zero increase of contentment.
But there are people who pay attention to style. To them it does matter how you decorate a cake, and it is worth questioning the ways in which evidentiary icing blends with expository frosting. Taken by itself, the evidentiary style is fine. Its texture is smooth and its flavor is even, neither weighing down nor overpowering the judicial sponge. The expository frosting on the other hand is granular and chunky, its flavor is sickly sweet. You can just feel your teeth rotting with every bite. Moreover, the sponge is compromised under its sheer mass. Justice is not lost but it is misshapen. This is not a matter of taste, it is a belief in the sponge’s integrity. The sponge means to do good, even if the sponge has a mealiness that is closer to cornbread than it is to cake.
Attempts to improve the expository frosting by mediating it as closely as possible to the elegance of the evidentiary icing has proved fruitless. It doesn’t seem to occur to the mixers that the cracks in the sponge are not rooted in the influence of what’s over it but are rather ingrained within its own mixture. There could be a few reasons for these vulnerabilities; errors in mixing the ingredients or in baking time and temperature. For this we return to our examples.
It’s easy to dismiss the interest in these cases as the product of our lurid fancy and nothing more. But it’s worth considering the extra work they do in validating our deterministic understanding of crime. Certain types of people are doomed to certain unlawful temptations. No explanation is required as to why a lab technician would fondle some tissue or why a stripper would pursue her interests with few boundaries. This is because we assume, not always wrongly, that certain types of people are just as driven to certain lifestyles and social roles. Yet a good expository frosting would not obscure the conditions of the roles that affect the role-players.
Perhaps the lab technician seeks a cavernous professional existence. This does not prevent them from being further molded by the time spent dwelling in the research caves. Unlike the doctors and nurses a few floors above, their faint connection to life is in inverse proportion to their extensive connection to death. Not only is spirit disconnected from flesh, but medicine is disconnected from science. The result is an unusually high threshold for disgust and an unusually low threshold for sentiment. The stripper, by extreme contrast, is over-connected. You could consider her as something like a nurse—she gives palliative care for dying emotions. And like dying bodies, those moribund psychic states are renewable and offer a reliable income. Unfortunately this hyper-social context rends the boundary between professional and private. Pretty soon everyone’s feelings are indistinguishably terminal. This creates unusual attractions of their own: people with no feelings whatever; people who are abridged in more ways than one.
A truly good frosting will reach still further and more broadly to our attitudes around bodily use. Not to relitigate the consent a corpse cannot give, but to scrutinize the dignity and hope we presume in human remains before the fact. Strange how they are nearly verbatim to your own feelings of dignity and hope. You look at your very much living, still-attached hand and are pleased that some strange person is not storing it in the fridge, in a jar labeled “Freddy.” You look at your wholesome friendships and healthy intimacies and could hardly see them improved upon in death. You. You. You. But is selfishness really to blame, or is it a rigid social custom of ours not to broach the subject when it is pertinent? Will there always be people who see so limited range of options for the destiny of their corpse and be satisfied completely? Are there at least a few people who do not share your hopes or your sense of dignity and want something more? There is only one way to find out and at the moment we dare not ask. And so the crime and the cake remain the same.
But a cake can be more than a dessert. A cake can also be a mirror. A cake can have a negative quality as to those parts of ourselves and our society that we hardly noticed or willfully overlook. So long as we keep in mind that sponge can break and that decoration has a purpose. And that criminal justice is also like all of these things.