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Alabama Dep't of Corrections has been stealing organs from prisoners (graphic descriptions)... - Tiangou - 04-19-2024
PSA: Avoid Alabama prisons.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/18/us/organs-removed-deceased-alabama-inmates/index.html
After inmate Jim Kennedy Jr. died last year at the Limestone Correctional Facility in Harvest, Alabama, his sister-in-law got an unusual call from the funeral home preparing the body for burial.
“Did y’all realize he came back without his organs?” Sara Kennedy recalled being told. “Liver, heart. All of your major organs. They were gone.”
“He had nothing,” said Kennedy’s brother, Marvin.
Another inmate suffered a similar fate. Arthur Stapler was 85 when he died five months after Kennedy Jr. at the Brookwood Baptist Medical Center in Birmingham. He had been housed at Hamilton Aged and Infirmed Center, which is also run by the Alabama Department of Corrections.
“It’s like a horror movie that I can’t wake up from,” said Stapler’s son, Billy, who learned about the missing organs after hiring a private pathologist to perform an autopsy on the body.
It was only after contacting the University of Alabama at Birmingham – which is among the providers that conducts autopsies for the prison system – that Stapler’s family received what they were told were his brain and heart in plastic viscera bags. The lungs and some other internal organs came back in pieces, but not all were returned.
With more than 26,000 inmates, Alabama’s severely overcrowded and understaffed prisons are the target of a US Justice Department lawsuit that alleges the state not only fails to prevent violence and sexual abuse behind bars but does not protect inmates from excessive force by prison staff or provide safe conditions.
Alabama’s men’s prisons are also the country’s deadliest, with a homicide rate in 2019 more than seven times higher than the national average, according to a report by the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative.
And the state’s mass incarceration nightmare does not appear to end with death...
And of course, lots of people are making money off of the stolen organs.
Re: Alabama Dep't of Corrections has been stealing organs from prisoners (graphic descriptions)... - cbelt3 - 04-19-2024
Um…. So post autopsy they just lost the gizzards ?
Re: Alabama Dep't of Corrections has been stealing organs from prisoners (graphic descriptions)... - pdq - 04-19-2024
Tiangou wrote:
And of course, lots of people are making money off of the stolen organs.
Most of this is just misunderstanding of what goes on in an autopsy. I presume there must be a state (AL) law that requires a full autopsy after an execution, even though the cause of death is a foregone conclusion.
In any case, here is a fairly brief description of a full autopsy. It includes this:
Once each organ has been examined within the body, it is removed, weighed and examined in further detail.
… Tissue samples are taken from the organs, some of which may be also be sectioned [ie cut in slices to examine the internal appearance and structure]
… Pathologists will preserve [usually small - ~1 inch samples] of any organs they dissect, particularly if they find something unusual or abnormal.
… Following examination, the organs are either returned to the body (minus the pieces preserved for future work or evidence) or cremated, in accordance with the law and the family's wishes.
After autopsy, the organs are often put back in a plastic bag, placed in the (now empty) chest/abdominal body cavity, and the body (temporarily) sewed closed for transport to the funeral home. In some of these cases, it sounds like they just incinerated the organs instead, before the rest of the body is sent to the funeral home. Autopsies are lmost always done in such a way that the deceased looks normal in an open-casket setting.
Most of the deceased’s organs would not be useful for transplantation (with certain exceptions: corneas, skin graft material, occasionally bone). There have been rare cases of employees/assistants retaining body parts (like large blood vessels) to sell for other purposes other than transplantation (to medical companies, for instance), but when this is found out, such people are in big big trouble.
If you want to know more, PM me.
Re: Alabama Dep't of Corrections has been stealing organs from prisoners (graphic descriptions)... - Tiangou - 04-19-2024
pdq wrote:
Most of this is just misunderstanding of what goes on in an autopsy. I presume there must be a state (AL) law that requires a full autopsy after an execution, even though the cause of death is a foregone conclusion...
No, it's not.
Read the article.
This isn't an ordinary autopsy situation.
They are illegally harvesting organs from deceased prisoners without family-consent for use in medical classrooms.
They're alleging that although there's a family-consent law, the warden is acting as in loco parentis and can authorize the sale of the organs.
And they're getting paid a bundle for it.
...The lawsuits cite a 2017 UAB Division of Autopsy publication that said 23% of the division’s yearly income from 2006 to 2015 derived from corrections department autopsies. The corrections department pays UAB $2,200 per autopsy and $100 per toxicology test, according to the suits.
Re: Alabama Dep't of Corrections has been stealing organs from prisoners (graphic descriptions)... - Ombligo - 04-19-2024
You know something - I have no issues with it. Frankly, I wish it was required of all deaths unless there is a specific religious reason not to.
A corpse is just dead tissue, that some have attached a particular meaning to it is a different superstition. There is a desperate need for both transplant organs and material for medical research. If the liver (or whatever) of a corpse can save another, then some good has come out of that death.
I know my opinion won't be overly popular, but I'm dead serious about it.
Re: Alabama Dep't of Corrections has been stealing organs from prisoners (graphic descriptions)... - Tiangou - 04-19-2024
Ombligo wrote:
A corpse is just dead tissue, that some have attached a particular meaning to it is a different superstition. There is a desperate need for both transplant organs and material for medical research. If the liver (or whatever) of a corpse can save another, then some good has come out of that death.
Religious groups might object to it being called "superstition."
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/281548/jewish/Autopsy-and-Embalming-of-a-Jewish-Body.htm
Even though the motive of medical study is a worthy one, Jewish tradition forcefully rejects autopsies performed for teaching medical students, because this violates a higher principle: that of mutilating the body of the deceased. Jewish law is governed by several basic principles:
First, man was created in the image of God, and in death his body still retains the unity of that image. One may not do violence to the human form even when the breath of life has expired. Judaism demands respect for the total man, his body as well as his soul. The worthiness of the whole of man may not be compromised even in death.
Second, the dissection of the body, for reasons that are not urgent and directly applicable to specific existing medical cases, is considered a matter of shame and gross dishonor. As he was born, so does the deceased deserve to be laid to rest: tenderly and lovingly, not scientifically and dispassionately, as though he were an impersonal object of some experiment. The holiness of the human being demands that we do not tamper with his person.
Third, we have no permission to use his body without his own express desire that it be used, and even then it is questionable whether the person himself may volunteer to mutilate the image in which he was created. Certainly, where the deceased in his lifetime gave no express permission, even his children have no rights of possession over his body. Thus, we have no moral right, except for the cases to be mentioned, to use the body of the deceased by offering it as an object for study.
Autopsies are indeed valid in certain unusual cases, and these are exceptions to the general prohibition...
Re: Alabama Dep't of Corrections has been stealing organs from prisoners (graphic descriptions)... - Blankity Blank - 04-19-2024
Ombligo wrote:
You know something - I have no issues with it. Frankly, I wish it was required of all deaths unless there is a specific religious reason not to.
A corpse is just dead tissue, that some have attached a particular meaning to it is a different superstition. There is a desperate need for both transplant organs and material for medical research. If the liver (or whatever) of a corpse can save another, then some good has come out of that death.
I know my opinion won't be overly popular, but I'm dead serious about it.
Can’t agree for two reasons.
I am hugely uncomfortable with the concept that, at any time, an entity acting on behalf of the state can unilaterally declare even a human’s remains “their” property to do with as they see fit. A slippery slope.
Add to that even a sliver of room for there to be financial gain injected into the equation, and my discomfort increases tenfold.
I’m old enough, and have heard of enough, for my cynicism and wariness to run deep about such things.
Re: Alabama Dep't of Corrections has been stealing organs from prisoners (graphic descriptions)... - pdq - 04-19-2024
Tiangou wrote:
...The lawsuits cite a 2017 UAB Division of Autopsy publication that said 23% of the division’s yearly income from 2006 to 2015 derived from corrections department autopsies. The corrections department pays UAB $2,200 per autopsy and $100 per toxicology test, according to the suits.
Believe it or not, that sounds like a typical charge for an autopsy, which is usually done by an MD (with an assistant during the dissection of the body). Then the MD typically looks at a sampling of the major organs on glass slides under a microscope, then dictates and signs off on a report (which may or may not include toxicology testing). The whole thing involves like ~3-4 hours of the MDs time, total, plus support folks and preparation of the slides.
Dunno how many deaths their corrections department has in a year, but it kinda makes sense that if they do have a death of a prisoner, they would have an autopsy done routinely. I would wildly guess maybe a hundred a year or less (not counting people that died outside corrections like homicide victims, even if the perp eventually entered the correction system because of that). In the world of medicine today, not a vast amount of money.
They ought not to be keeping all the organs without consent (if that is true) but that wouldn't be done for any profit.
Re: Alabama Dep't of Corrections has been stealing organs from prisoners (graphic descriptions)... - Speedy - 04-19-2024
IIRC, there is a surplus of donated corpses so most medical schools are not accepting many donations unless the person’s body has something medically unusual. I couldn’t donate my body (in order to save funeral expenses) but my daughter can because she has had renal failure since birth. Upon her death her corpse will go to the Mayo Clinic’s renal transplant department. Mine will go to the Dewey, Cheatem and Howe Funeral Home for cremation.
Re: Alabama Dep't of Corrections has been stealing organs from prisoners (graphic descriptions)... - Lemon Drop - 04-19-2024
At least they waited until they were dead. I mean I hope...