The Grave Case of the Missing Body

It almost reads like an episode of “L.A. Law”--a lawsuit over negligent mishandling of a corpse.

In fact, the popular NBC television series did have an episode last season in which a wife successfully sued a funeral home because her husband’s corpse was dismembered and shipped to various hospitals for research.

Now, a real-life California Court of Appeal has heard a similar case and decided that close family members can sue for emotional distress when a funeral home misplaces the corpse.

The factual allegations in the suit are not pleasant. Lupe Quesada died on December 9, 1979. His body was taken to the Santa Clara County Recorder’s office for an autopsy and was then to have been transferred to a funeral home for burial. Instead, another body was delivered to the mortuary.

The widow, sister and niece of the deceased insisted that the body was that of a stranger. But despite their protests, the stranger’s body was buried in Quesada’s grave. Five days later, the mix-up was confirmed, the stranger’s body was exhumed and the body of Quesada was put in its proper place.

The funeral home settled the suit filed by the wife for an undisclosed amount but contended that it was not liable to the sister and niece.

One of the critical questions for the court was who had the right to sue. Or as Justice J. Ardaiz put it in his majority opinion: “In that the body itself suffers no legally recognizable damage by virtue of a defendant’s claimed negligence, the question becomes to whom is the duty owed to abstain from such negligent behavior.”

Whether a result is foreseeable is a key component in determining how far to allow a tort recovery of this type. And the court concluded that those who have custody of the remains of a deceased should know that surviving friends and family will be emotionally vulnerable and may develop severe mental trauma if they are shown another person’s body instead of the proper one.

“Concerns about the loss or misplacement of the deceased’s body, the failure to provide religious or spiritual rites to the deceased and improper interment of another would understandably preoccupy those close to the deceased,” Ardaiz wrote.

But there are public policy concerns besides the foreseeability of harm. The court needed to set limits on who could sue and how extensive the emotional distress might be to warrant recovery. The court was reluctant, for example, to let anyone who attended the funeral file a lawsuit, especially in light of recent California Supreme Court cases that have limited the expansion of emotional distress-type claims.

In one recent significant case, the California Supreme Court limited emotional distress claims to someone who is closely related to the victim, is present at the scene of the injury-producing event and suffers distress beyond what would be anticipated in a disinterested witness.

Using that analysis as a base, this appellate court ruled that only close family members, usually (but not necessarily only) those residing in the same household, or parents, siblings, children or grandparents, could sue for the negligent handling of a corpse.

Assuming that the Supreme Court does not clarify this unusual case, the existing ruling would seem to make it difficult for the niece to win her case, but the sister has a better chance.