Is more cemetery regulation needed? Lawsuit plaintiffs say answer is yes
Galilee Memorial Gardens was closed two years ago, and the owner of the Memphis, Tennessee-area cemetery got probation in a plea deal.
But relatives and friends of hundreds of people allegedly buried there in unknown graves, according to an ongoing Tennessee lawsuit, are still seeking answers about the locations of their loved ones, the Associated Press reports.
Part of the problem, they contend, is lax government regulation that allowed the situation, and there appears to be a basis for that claim, the AP says. The feds largely leave oversight to individual states, where laws and enforcement vary substantially but rarely provide for more than licensing cemeteries, developing a complaint procedure and protecting consumers who buy burial plots in advance of their deaths.
“Cemetery regulation is almost uniformly awful, where it exists at all,” says director Joshua Slocum of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a nonprofit which advocates for more federal regulation.
Ironically, a similar claim is made by an attorney for Jemar Lambert, the Galilee Memorial Gardens owner who got probation after accusations that he put multiple bodies in the same grave and crushed caskets to get them into a single plot.
Many problems at the cemetery existed before Lambert was born, yet he is blamed for them, says attorney William J. Haynes III in a written statement.
“Many of the allegations surrounding Jemar’s tenure at Galilee do not take these facts into account,” Haynes wrote. “That is highly unfair to Jemar and his family.”
Related coverage:
ABA Journal: “Grave Concerns: Mortuarial Mismanagement Makes Mourners Mad”
Daily Southtown: “Ex-Burr Oak Cemetery workers get prison time”
See also:
ABAJournal.com: “‘Casket cartel’ rules banning sales by monks are nixed by 5th Circuit”
Correction
Updated on April 12 to fix a misspelling of the cemetery name.
