The Social Security Administration "Creates" Thousands of "Undead" Americans

That's the subject of this post from the Funeral Law blog, which discusses this CNN Money article on how the Social Security Administration wrongfully declares approximately 14,000 people dead each year. The SSA receives millions of death reports each year. Some of these reports are mistaken, but occasionally, these mistaken reports are entered into the SSA's "Death Master File" database.

Banks work with the SSA to prevent fraudulent use of identities, so anybody who has been entered into the Death Master File database has their accounts frozen. Moreover, those people stop receiving government benefits that they may sorely need.

The Funeral Law Blog reports that those who have wrongfully been declared dead are not out of luck, but the process to be "revived" is not an easy one:

There is hope for those 14,000 people the SSA wrongfully declares dead each year. First, they will need to find a copy of their death certificate and have it amended to make them not dead. They then need to take the amended death certificate and a photo ID to their Social Security office. After the SSA declares you revived, you can then go to your bank and work with them to re-open your accounts. While this process will likely take months, it is probably a better option than dying to save time on the paperwork.

Hopefully the SSA can solve this problem soon. While only a small percentage of SSA beneficiaries become "undead," the consequences of this designation are extremely inconvenient for those unlucky few.

Learning About Funeral Law: Past and Present

I recently ran across The Funeral Law Blog, a fascinating blog that discusses various legal issues relating to burial procedures, cemeteries, and other funeral-related matters. While I confess that I had never thought of this as an existing subject of legal study, the posts at this blog cover some pretty interesting stories and legal issues.

For example, I ran across this post by James Harrell, which discusses the purchase of an old cemetery in Indiana. A farmer purchased the plot of land on which a historical cemetery was located and transferred the land back to the town following the purchase. The farmer owned and farmed land on all sides of the cemetery. His intention here was to preserve the cemetery and to keep it from developers. But his plan may have backfired:

Under William C. Haak Trust v. Willusz, 949 N.E.2d 833, an easement of necessity can arise in Indiana if a piece of land is parceled out and sold, leaving one parcel without access to a public road. One claiming an easement of necessity must prove 1) unity of title at the time of severance, and 2) necessity of the easement. Here, the farmer may have unintentionally created a pathway for future owners to claim an easement of necessity. Prior to the farmer purchasing the cemetery, there was no unity of title between his farm area and the cemetery. Anyone attempting to establish an easement by necessity would have been unable to do so. However, since the farmer purchased the title to the cemetery, he created a unified title between his farm land and the cemetery via the doctrine of merger. Finally, when he parceled out the cemetery and transferred ownership back to the West Creek Township, he inadvertently created the first element needed to prove an easement by necessity.

Harrell points out that the town will hopefully keep the land from further development, but notes that this is a cautionary tale that highlights the importance of hiring lawyers.

On a related note, while paging through some old issues of The Green Bag, I came across Frank W. Grinnell's article, Legal Rights in the Remains of the Dead. Grinnell surveys American and British law on the subject of the dispositions of bodies after death and contrasts the legal systems. British law was especially curious when it came to the subject of cremation:

In England there has been a curious conflict of law between the ecclesiastical and the civil courts as to the right to cremate a body in the absence of the express wish of the deceased. It has been pointed out by Hon. Samuel R. Ruggles, in a well-known report, that the English ecclesiastical courts exercise over the burial of the dead "a legal, secular authority which they had gradually abstracted from the ancient civil courts to which it originally belonged," and that the separate existence and authority of the English ecclesiastical courts, therefore, has helped to prevent the civil courts from developing the law of individual rights in the matter. [Footnote omitted]

The full version of Grinnell's article is available on Hein Online here. At approximately eight pages, it is a surprisingly long article for the Green Bag. The citation is: 17 Green Bag 345 (1905).

All of these findings are a bit dark, but they are part of an interesting and necessary area of the law that has more ties to other subject matter than I initially realized.