Two teenagers who broke into a mausoleum, cut off a corpse's head and played with it were convicted Friday of violating the dead under an ancient Scottish law used by prosecutors for the first time in more than a century.
Sonny Devlin, 17, of Edinburgh, and his 15-year-old companion, who could not be named as a minor, were found guilty in the High Court of "violation of a sepulcher" for their acts in the city's Greyfriar's Cemetery in June last year. Both had pleaded innocent.
The crime, which incorporates the Latin term for a burial place, carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment -- one that is unlikely to be given to the youths when they are sentenced April 20.
The last recorded court case on this charge was in 1899, when William Coutts faced six such charges.
Coutts was jailed for six months for digging up coffins to use for other burials.
The law was most often used in the first part of the 19th century to prosecute "body-snatchers" who removed corpses for use as anatomical specimens.
During the children's trial, Andrew Henderson, who operates City of the Dead Tours, which takes visitors through graveyards, testified that he saw the accused run out of the mausoleum of George Mackenzie.
Mackenzie was a well-known figure in Scotland's history who was buried in the mausoleum in 1691.
Mackenzie earned the nickname "Bluidy," or "Bloody," for torturing and prosecuting Scots who opposed the English belief that the king was the head of the Anglican Church.
An inspection of the tomb, which contains several bodies, found a number of broken and disturbed graves.
Witnesses told the court the defendants broke into the grave on a dare to snatch the head, which was in a mummified state.
The pair then threw it back and forth, and Devlin, who admitted that he had been drinking heavily before the incident, simulated a sex act with it.
Devlin and his co-defendant stared straight ahead as the verdict was delivered, but several of their relatives broke down in tears in the public gallery.
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