Harvard Medical School and a program director can be sued for its alleged failure to properly supervise a morgue manager who for several years engaged in a “macabre scheme” to sell body parts from donated cadavers for profit, the state’s highest court ruled Monday.

The Supreme Judicial Court unanimously concluded that Harvard and Mark F. Cicchetti, managing director of the school’s Anatomical Gift Program at the time that the morgue’s manager, Cedric Lodge, was stealing and selling body parts from the facility, are not protected by limited immunity under the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, or UAGA.

“Instead of the dignified treatment and disposal of human remains required by the act, the donors’ remains were ghoulishly dismembered and sold for profit under the most horrifying of circu

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