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Washington, DC, April 1, 2014 Following the outcome of Rooney v. Shanley, in which the US Supreme Court voided all statutes of limitation for sex crimes, US Attorney General Martha Coakley announced her intention to seek indictments against accused sex offenders who have been dead for up to three centuries.

"The state of law and order in the present rests firmly upon our commitment to mopping up the past," said Coakley. "We've been letting the deceased get away with much too much for far too long."

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Ms Coakley concedes that prosecuting the dead presents logistical problems. The dead cannot appear in court without assistance, have trouble responding to interrogation, and may, in some instances, smell. The disparate needs of the buried and the cremated suggest that separate procedures may have to be developed to suit each class of human remains. It might also be prudent to accommodate some defendants' states of decomposition.

Attorney General Coakley has a history of strong, decisive action against sexual predators. During her career as a Massachusetts prosecutor, she obtained convictions and lifetime civil commitments for hundreds of individuals, whether or not there happened to be evidence of any crime.

Ms Coakley has asked Klaus Goebbels, a former Attorney General of the State of Utah, to head the DOJ's new program of posthumous prosecutions. The project, known as "Operation Body Bag," will initially confine its focus to three cases:

· On Christmas Eve, 1942, Father Seamus Gilhooley allegedly squeezed the left buttock of 15-year-old Delmer Melmermelch in the choir loft of St. Dismas's Church in East Shaftoe, New York. "What Pol Pot did to Cambodia," says Melmermelch, "Father Gilhooley did to me. As a Christian, I pray daily for that homo's neverending white-hot pain. Our Lord might plunge him into molten feces at the bottom of the deepest, foulest cesspool in Perdition, and might chain him there to writhe and scream until the expiration of the cosmos, and would that be enough? No sir." Melmermelch, now 78, says he recovered the memory of his molestation by the popular pastor, who died in 1964, just last year. He has already received an out-of-court settlement of $652,234.24 from the Archdiocese of New York, but says his nightmare of victimization can only be exorcised by Father Gilhooley's posthumous conviction.

· From 1889 to 1895, Wyoming cattle baron Jep Shankmore, a lifelong bachelor, ran a disorderly house named the Pink Nugget near the town of Corn Wipe, east of Cheyenne. The operation catered to persons the February 6, 1894 issue of The Police Gazette dubbed "range inverts." For two dollars, a weary cattle herder could obtain a bath, a meal, another cowboy, and sometimes a Native American brave. A bunkhouse offering multi- partner wrangling opportunities was provided; patrons rode down from Montana to take part. The facility closed in April, 1895, after Thunderbutt Bakewater shot Hoke Dinkey in the face at point-blank range as they fought in an upstairs bedroom over an Arapaho called Laughing Wolf. Bakewater went to the scaffold, but Shankmore, though unmasked as a brothel keeper, dodged prosecution. Justice Department spokesman Bruce Taylor notes that Laughing Wolf is known to have been 23 at the time of his employment at the Pink Nugget, placing everyone on the premises in violation of the True Love Waits Act (TLWA) of 2010. Crafted and sponsored by Senators Diane Feinstein (D.- California) and Mary Cheney (R.- Connecticut), the TLWA standardized age of consent nationwide at age 26, retroactive to pre-Columbian times. Taylor says the DOJ will invoke RICO the Racketeer-Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act-- to facilitate efforts to convict Shankmore, who died in 1921, on charges of trafficking in child prostitution. "We smell NAMBLA," he intimates.

· In 1703, the Reverend Hezekiah Buntrip of Portland, Maine, was rumored to have dropped his hand upon the knee of Mistress Annelina Gancey, tickling her through seven thicknesses of calico and causing much distress. Members of the Gancey family say their ancestress's newly discovered diaries show that the incident, which took place in a back pew at Portland's Lamb of God Chapel, caused the previously robust woman to develop eczema. It also triggered a chronic, involuntary twitching of the leg, a phenomenon now known to medical science as the Gancey Dance. No action was taken against Buntrip at the time of his transgression, though Mistress Gancey's cries of distress were heard by fishermen trolling for cod in Portland Harbor three miles away. Journal entries indicate that during the touching of Mistress Gancey's knee, the Reverend "did display a goodlie firm tumescence close within the trousered crossroads of his groin," and that he then began to salivate "in most unseemlie fashion." Additional evidence includes "The Clutching Paw," a narrative poem in which Gancey describes the assault on her person at exhaustive length. "That this evidence survived is such a blessing," says Ms Coakley. "Back in 1713, when Buntrip died of ague, the gentleman must have thought his demise would get him off the hook. But no."

If found guilty, Gilhooley, Shankmore, Buntrip, and other deceased sex felons will be exhumed and transferred under guard to federal internment cemeteries at Langley, Virginia, and elsewhere. Attorney General Coakley says she plans to initiate one-day- to-end-of-time civil commitment proceedings against all departed offenders, regardless of the length of each miscreant's criminal sentence. "For the well-being of their victims and society at large," she says, "I promise to make sure these deviant cadavers moulder behind bars until the last remaining trace of DNA is gone."

"You'd be surprised what corpses are capable of," she adds. "Not for nothing do we call them stiffs."