Criminal Prosecution
Ray Brent Marsh was arrested on over 300 criminal violations and was ultimately charged by the State of Georgia with 787 counts, including theft by deception, abusing a corpse, burial service related fraud and giving false statements. Marsh was facing a possible prison sentence of thousands of years.
Marsh was represented by McCracken Poston who a few years before had been the lawyer for Alvin "The Zenith Man" Ridley from nearby Ringgold, Georgia, and Ron Cordova of Newport Beach, California. Cordova was a former Orange County, California prosecutor and like Poston, had served in the state legislature. Both Poston and Cordova are experienced criminal lawyers who first teamed up two years earlier in the trial of Byron Looper for the murder of a Tennessee state senator.
The criminal cases against Marsh were settled after the Georgia Supreme Court had certified for review the defense question of whether a human corpse had any pecuniary value, an issue vital to the case in order to determine if the thefts could even be criminally prosecuted. The traditional common law holding is that a corpse does not have pecuniary value.
Marsh eventually pled guilty and is currently serving a twelve year sentence with credit for the time he had spent in custody before obtaining pretrial release on bond.
Read more about this topic: Tri-State Crematory
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