Drawing Necessary Distinctions - An Exploration of Medical and Legal Ethics

Riding the train this morning, my significant other was perusing the free papers when he came upon a story he knew I’d be all over: a Frenchman by the name of Nicolas Cocaign is being tried for the murder and cannibalization of his prison cellmate.

Cocaign’s guilt is not in question. Not only has he freely confessed to the crime, but he looks like the kind of person who might crave human meat. His patchy beard proves that he’s a sexual pervert, and he’s festively tattooed much of his face, an outré sartorial decision even among sociopaths. Were I to sketch my idea of a convict with an overwhelming compulsion to consume his own kind, this is the guy I’d come up with.

In contemplating Cocaign’s crime, I think it’s important to consider the murder separate from the cannibalization. Murder is a heinous act, whether it occurs within the confines of a prison or in the outside world. That being said, murderers are housed in prisons, so sometimes prisoners get murdered. Had Cocaign, a crazy person previously convicted of multiple violent offences, killed a fellow prisoner and left it at that, this story would not be in the papers. No one would care.

Our interest stems from the fact that Cocaign, who allegedly killed his cellmate for having repeatedly clogged their shared toilet, opted to dine on the dead man’s lung. He ate a bit of it raw, and then fried the rest with onions, French prison cells apparently coming equipped with kitchenettes. I’m more than happy to acknowledge the obvious benefits to be had by sequestering potentially dangerous cannibals away from polite society, but I don’t consider man-on-man snacking to be an inherently evil act on par with murder. Frankly, once you’ve gone to the trouble of killing someone, you might as well get a meal out of it.

It’s the irrational reverence for cadavers that I find so confounding. Dead is dead. If once I’m dead a bunch of flesh-fiends feel compelled to dig up my lifeless body and eat it, so be it. You may be saying to yourself, “That’s fine for her because she’s nothing but a nihilistic atheist,” but even the religious should follow me on this one. If upon death your soul ascends to heaven, leaving behind nothing but a corpse, the corpse itself is meaningless. Anyway, your remains will eventually fall prey to animals. I just see no problem with those animals being human.

Cannibals aren’t necessarily bad people. Several years ago two Germans, both of whom were, to put it charitably, mildly deranged, met on the internet. Man A wanted to eat a human and Man B wanted to be eaten. This was to be an unorthodox love story. A and B met at A’s house, where they both attempted to consume a portion of B’s severed penis. This didn’t quite pan out, so B put away enough alcohol and sleeping pills to lose consciousness, at which point A killed and butchered him, storing his body parts in the freezer. Over the course of the next several months, A consumed B.

A is currently serving a life sentence for murder, and that’s wrong. A is not evil, A is sick. His intent was not malicious. Torture was not a goal, and murder was only a factor because supermarkets don’t sell human meat. All of the available evidence indicates that absolutely everything that happened between A and B was consensual. A isn’t a bad person. He belongs not in prison, but in a psychiatric facility.

As for Cocaign, he’s a violent offender who ended at least one life and destroyed many others. Don’t minimize that by fretting about his taste for human lungs. Punish him for what he’s done wrong, keep a close eye on him, and confiscate his hotplate.