Last week a jury was seated and opening statements were begun in the criminal trial of Arthur Rathburn, age 64, of Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan.  Rathburn is accused of fraudulently misrepresenting his unusual product, that of parts of bodies that had been donated for research.  According to an article on the case that you can find here, Rathburn is charged with 13 federal crimes in the case.

The article further states that Rathburn specialized in selling or making available for rental donated cadavers and body parts to schools, researchers, and primary medical conventions.  He has been jailed since his arrest in 2016.

Federal prosecutors claim Rathburn, with the help of his ex-wife, operated the business fraudulently from 2007 until 2013.  Rathburn was a licensed funeral director who at one time worked at the University of Michigan, serving as donor coordinator, from 1984 to 1990.

Funeral Director Daily take:  We will be watching how this case turns out.  As you may be aware of, the for-profit sale of human body parts has operated in a somewhat gray area in the law.  The anatomical bequest business, which once was simply the domain of  medical schools who procured donated bodies simply for the advancement of science, has moved into a world where for-profit companies take control of donated bodies for the sake of selling the bodies, or parts of them, for profits.

Reuters News Agency did an expose on this industry this past October.  You can find the Funeral Director Daily synopsis of it here with a link to the Reuters article.

Where it can really affect funeral directors is that Reuters contends that some of the for-profit networks will pay what amounts to a “finders fee” to those who can acquire the bodies for them.  Reuters alleges that they can identify at least 62 funeral directors in the United States who engage in that process, some of  whom made over $400,000 annually by advertising “Free Cremations” to consumers then having the consumers sign their body over to the for-profit company.  The “free cremation” came for the consumer when the body, or parts of it, were cremated and returned to the family after the for-profit agency had made their profit from it.

Our guess is that state legislatures or the U.S. Congress may have to step in with additional rules governing the rules of anatomical gifting.

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