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On May 1st, President Barack Obama announced to the world that U.S. forces had killed Osama bin Laden.  Among the predictable reactions was a large dose of skepticism, especially when the White House later briefed that bin Laden had been buried at sea.  Naysayers across the globe demanded proof, namely photos or videos of bin Laden’s body. As of this writing, President Obama has decided not to release the purportedly grisly photographs.The clamor to see “the body” reminds me of the term corpus delicti.  It is derived from Latin for body (corpus) and crime (delictum), so literally it means “the body of the crime.”  As a legal term, corpus delicti has evolved to mean the body of evidence to prove a crime. So, for homicide it could be a literal corpus (but doesn’t have to be—more on that later).  In other instances, however, the corpus delicti could be evidence like stolen items (for larceny) or a torched house (for arson).  Many state jurisdictions still follow the common law corpus delicti rule, which prevents a defendant’s out-of-court confession from being admitted unless accompanied by independent evidence that the charged crime has occurred (the corpus delicti).  This rule’s purpose is to prevent convictions based solely on an accused’s confession—important when considering that when the rule was developed a few centuries ago, false confessions stemming from mental illness or coercion were not uncommon.*A look at a British case cited as one of the forbears of the corpus delicti rule demonstrates the drama that ensues when a murder victim shows up for dinner one day.  In Perry’s Case, Mr. William Harrison went missing and his servant, John Perry, was cast as the prime suspect. Initially denying any involvement, Perry eventually confessed that he, his mother, and brother had killed Mr. Harrison and dumped his corpus in a swamp. Based solely on Perry’s confession, all three were convicted and executed.  (Happy Mother’s Day!) Years later, Mr. Harrison returned, claiming he had been kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery in Turkey, which apparently was the 1600’s equivalent of going to rehab.  Good news for Harrison’s friends; bad news for the Perrys.Remember when I said before that the corpus delicti rule only requires evidence of the crime—it doesn’t literally require the prosecution to produce a body?  In a hilarious misunderstanding, 1940s British serial killer John George Haigh thought that he could avoid being convicted of murder as long as made all his corpuses disappear. Now, if you’ve ever watched Dexter, you know that serial killing produces one unholy mess.  So Haigh decided to give his victims a bath—a sulfuric acid bath, to be exact, reducing those bulky bodies to a compact slurry. Later on, inconvenient bits of evidence (gallstones, dentures, etc.) helped convict him, and he hung for his crimes, after earning the nickname “The Acid Bath Murderer” (seriously, that’s the best the British press could do?).So there you have it—even the “body of evidence” rule doesn’t require an actual body.  Perhaps the President is making the best call; after all, our judicial system allows us to convict someone of murder based on the same amount of (or perhaps less) evidence than the government has provided to prove ObL’s demise.  Nonetheless, some diehard skeptics will always need more than a gallon of slurry to prove that the body really has hit the floor.*The federal system and several states have replaced the corpus delicti rule with a corroboration rule, which requires some evidence to demonstrate the trustworthiness of an out-of-court confession—not necessarily evidence that the crime itself has occurred. For a much better explanation than I can provide here, I recommend this Ohio State Law Journal article by Professor David Moran.