A Colorado judge on Friday rejected a plea agreement for a funeral home owner who acknowledged abusing 191 corpses, many of which languished in a room-temperature building for years as the owner and his wife maintained a lavish lifestyle.

The rare decision to reject the agreement came after families of the dead who were given fake ashes asked for a more severe punishment for Jon Hallford, who owned and operated Return to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado Springs with his wife, Carie.

The plea agreement called for a 20-year prison sentence that would run concurrently with his 20-year federal sentence, meaning he could have been freed many years earlier than if the sentences ran consecutively.

Colorado has struggled to effectively oversee funeral homes and, for many years, had some of th

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