A current trial in Germany is a reminder of Jeffrey Dahmner’s habit of eating his hook-ups. The case concerns Armin Meiwes, a computer tech known as the “the cannibal,”

Germany has charged Meiwes with killing and eating a willing victim he met in an Internet chat room.

Meiwes placed an ad on the Internet seeking a “young man who wanted to be eaten,” according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. More than 200 men answered.

Meiwes told the court that whether one is seeking “necrophiliacs or sadists or masochists, there are hundreds out there on the Int%rnet.

The case began in March 2001, when Meiwes, then 41, posted his ad. 42-year-old Bernd Brandes, a Berlin engineer with a history of depression, answered the ad. They met in a farmhouse in the central German city of Rotenburg. After meeting Meiwes, Brandes numbed himself with sleeping pills and schnapps. Meiwes sliced off and cooked part of Brandes’s flesh and the men ate it. Brandes then took a bath. Meiwes read a book. Hours later, Meiwes stabbed Brandes to death. He then cut his body into pieces and placed them in his freezer.

Reports indicate that Meiwes spent the next several days eating Brandes, flavoring his meals with oil and garlic while drinking South African red wine.

Cannibalism is not illegal in Germany. Meiwes, charged with homicide, claims that he can’t be so charged because Brandes consented to be killed and eaten. His lawyer claims that Meiwes can only be charged with “killing upon request,” or assisted suicide, similar to the charges against Jack Kevorkian in this country.

Prosecutors, however, charge this was sexual perversion gone amok. A search of Meiwes’s house found more than 600 photos depicting the killing of Brandes and Meiwes’ cannibalism. Police also found 300 videotapes and 16 computers.

Ironically, cannibalism and necrophilia are not necessarily crimes in California. However, California does not recognize consent to aggravated battery (attack). It follows that one cannot consent to one’s murder or mayhem (chopping off body parts).

In 1993, in People v. Thompson, a man stabbed a woman to death, but when he finished stabbing her, he picked her up from the floor and placed her on the bed. He did not know if she was alive or dead, he testified. At this point, he decided to rape her to “embarrass her.” He pulled down her pants and underwear, but then abandoned the idea.

A jury convicted him of murder, but it also convicted him of attempted rape. He claimed it was legally impossible to rape a dead person. The court agreed, stating that rape requires a live victim because it requires non-consensual intercourse.

The court found that a person who intends to have sexual intercourse with a dead body, can be guilty of neither rape nor attempted rape. However, the court went on to find that if the person intended to rape a woman he believed was alive (but was, in reality, dead) then he could be convicted of attempted rape.

In a 1982 case, Gonzalez v. Sacramento Memorial Lawn, the mortuary had hired a 21-year-old female employee without doing a background check. The check would have revealed that since age 14 she had been diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic. She had been in a state mental hospital for 22 months.

While working at the mortuary she exhibited abnormal conduct. But it wasn’t until a man discovered that the remains of his son were missing that she admitted to committing 20-40 acts of necrophilia prior to stealing the body of a male cadaver.

Here, the mortuary was sued for negligence in hiring and supervising the female employee.

California should make necrophilia a crime, punishable the same way as rape is punished, as a serious felony. Cannibalism should also be a crime. In those rare cases where someone must eat the flesh of another dead human being in order to survive, the legal defense known as “necessity” would excuse the crime.

And mortuaries and medical schools and other facilities dealing with dead bodies should have background checks. If pedophiles seek to be near children, obviously necrophiliacs and cannibals seek to be near the dead.