Code of Virginia (1849), ch. 196 § 13, Violation of sepulture

The statute, read directly, and not through anyone’s paraphrase.

”§ 13. If a free person, unlawfully, disinter or displace a dead human body, or any part of a dead human body, which shall have been deposited in any vault or other burial place, he shall be confined in jail not more than one year, and fined not exceeding five hundred dollars.”

🔴 The phrase “violation of the sepulcher” does not exist in Virginia law

Jodi Koste’s 2012 article renders the section as “violation of the sepulcher.” That is her wording, not the legislature’s. A word count of the entire 1849 Code:

• sepulture → 4
• sepulcher → 0
• sepulchre → 0

The rubric, in the table of sections, in the running head, and in the index, is “Violation of sepulture.”

A draft of REFUSE put quotation marks around Koste’s phrase and attributed it to the General Assembly. That is a fabricated quotation, and it was caught at Stage 0 on 2026-07-14 by an agent that went and counted the words in the Code. It is the same defect class as the Ambedkar quotation withdrawn from the Out-Caste Doctrine the same day. Never quote a secondary source’s rendering as though it were statutory text.

The condition that makes this statute devastating

Read the clause the essay nearly missed:

“which shall have been deposited in any vault or other burial place”

The law protects the buried. That is its plain and limiting condition. To disinter is to un-inter, and a body that was never interred cannot be disinterred.

Now set it beside the Family Representative Council, in their own final report:

“at least some of the EMSW Ancestors may never have been deliberately buried.”

Take a person from the almshouse. Take a person who died in the school’s own infirmary. By the plain words of § 13, no crime has occurred.

The protection was not merely unenforced. For an unknown number of the people in that well, it was never available. The surest way for the school to stay inside the statute was to obtain people who had never been given a grave.

And “or any part of a dead human body” is a phrase that reads as though it were drafted for a well of commingled, disarticulated remains.

The enforcement gap, which is separate and also real

Koste, in the same paragraph in which she cites this section: public officials “generally ignored those engaged in grave robbing activities particularly when slaves or free blacks were the target.”

The penalty numbers verify exactly against the statute: “not more than one year” and “not exceeding five hundred dollars.”

Note on the date

The marginal citation on § 13 points to the session acts of 1847-48, p. 112. The 1848 date is sound. It is not, however, evidence of when the well came into use. See koste-2012-anatomical-training-richmond for why that coincidence must not be drawn.