[HN Gopher] Alabama prisoners' organs vanish, and there's a whol...
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Alabama prisoners' organs vanish, and there's a whole lot of
passing the buck
Author : Jimmc414
Score : 115 points
Date : 2024-05-14 17:32 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.al.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.al.com)
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| Related:
|
| Case of Alabama prisoner's missing heart is dismissed. His heart
| was never found. 4/25/24
| https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2024/04/case-of-alabama-p...
|
| Alabama prisoner's brain missing after UAB autopsy, says family
| 2/14/24 https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2024/02/alabama-
| prisoners...
|
| UAB stealing dead Alabama prison inmates' organs after autopsies,
| families claim in lawsuit 4/18/24
| https://www.al.com/news/2024/04/uab-stealing-dead-alabama-pr...
|
| Alabama House passes bill to make it felony to retain organs from
| autopsy without consent 4/25/24
| https://www.al.com/news/2024/04/alabama-house-passes-bill-to...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| To be very clear: not for transplants, but for training med
| students.
|
| > The students were told the removal of organs were part of
| autopsies required by law for prisoners. They were told that
| using them for teaching future physicians "benefits future
| patients," and if organs weren't used they'd be thrown away and
| would serve no useful purpose.
| consumer451 wrote:
| But money changes hands?
| soks86 wrote:
| Medical students can't be learning for free now.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Is there a line in the article I'm missing saying this?
| consumer451 wrote:
| I meant to ask the question, and phrased it poorly.
| hammock wrote:
| "The prison system and UAB have an agreement for UAB to
| perform autopsies as an independent contractor. That
| agreement was filed as an exhibit in the new lawsuits.
| According to that document, the prison system pays $2,200
| per autopsy and $100 per toxicology test.
|
| "According to the lawsuit, UAB Division of Autopsy
| publications from 2006 to 2015 show that 23% of their
| yearly income comes from Department of Corrections
| autopsies"
|
| https://www.al.com/news/2024/04/uab-stealing-dead-alabama-
| pr....
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They'd be having the autopsies regardless. They're not
| the issue.
|
| > All people who die in custody have an autopsy, multiple
| prison officials testified in a federal court hearing
| earlier this year.
| g00gler wrote:
| I'm not sure if $2,200 is a lot or a little but isn't
| there some non-zero cost associated with facilitating,
| transporting, storing and performing the autopsies
| regardless of whether the examiner is paid or is a
| student? Eg clerical work, drivers, equipment, use of a
| vehicle, refrigerators, etc.
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| The argument that organs would be thrown away otherwise doesn't
| justify bypassing clearly defined consent and ethical
| standards.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I agree entirely; they're two separate things.
|
| Was this unethical? Yes. Is it the darkly hinted about
| conspiracy to procure black-market organs some will read into
| the headline? No.
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| You'll need to point out this darkly hinted conspiracy in
| the headline. Nowhere is it implied that someone was killed
| for their organs. If this was happening at Johns Hopkins,
| it would certainly be a story. The fact that they are
| prisoners should be irrelevant.
| jeremycw wrote:
| It omits that the prisoners are deceased and uses the
| term "vanish" which implies it's not known where the
| organs have gone.
|
| "Alabama prisoners' organs vanish, and there's a whole
| lot of passing the buck" could easily be "Deceased
| prisoners' organs taken by University of Alabama against
| families wishes" but that's not going to get the clicks.
| alwa wrote:
| And also to be clear, "vanish" from people who died in state
| custody, post-autopsy--not from people who are currently
| prisoners. And "vanish" to the same medical training uses as
| non-prisoners' donated organs.
|
| The (very reasonable) question being whether it's appropriate
| for the warden rather than the family to authorize the
| donation, when family is in the picture.
|
| The title seems to willfully invoke the far more sinister
| "organ-harvesting" trope that's alarmingly a live issue in
| other carceral systems to this day [0], but that's not what the
| article's actual allegations describe.
|
| [0] e.g. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/06/china-
| un-hum...
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _The title seems to willfully invoke the far more sinister
| "organ-harvesting"_
|
| No place on earth is more annoyingly finicky about headlines
| than HN.
|
| Black market organ harvesting of live prisoners didn't even
| cross my mind when reading this headline. What makes you
| think they are willfully invoking that trope? The use of
| "vanish"?
|
| Could you illustrate a better, but still concise, title?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "used after death without family consent to train medical
| students" is much more accurate than "vanish".
|
| Quite a few people hold conspiratorial opinions of organ
| transplantation, like that doctors won't work as hard to
| save people flagged as donors.
| https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/consumer-
| health...
| ziddoap wrote:
| I believe that _" Alabama prisoners' organs used after
| death without family consent to train medical students"_
| exceeds HNs title character limit, and it also leaves out
| the fact that the blame for it is being shifted around --
| an important component (arguably the most important
| component) of this story.
| dsr_ wrote:
| It crossed my mind, because it is strongly suspected that
| China does that to low-level political prisoners and
| members of despised minority groups.
|
| 2018: https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5250
|
| 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/17/china-
| is-harve...
| Natsu wrote:
| Yeah, it also crossed my mind.
| woooooo wrote:
| It's confirmed that, if you're executed by the state for
| treason there, you become an organ donor as part of that
| deal. Waste not and all that.
|
| The speculative part is where people start making organs
| the main point of the whole thing, it has a great ick
| factor if you're doing nationalist flamewars.
| more_corn wrote:
| "Deal" implies consent. But it's also a dangerous
| financial incentive. Oh innocent? Humm, I can make 10k
| from his organs if that evidence gets lost.
| woooooo wrote:
| Of course nobody consents to being executed.
|
| There are numbers on how many people get executed there:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Chi
| na#...
|
| It seems unlikely that the person making prosecution and
| judgment decisions is also in a position to personally
| acquire and sell the person's organs but hey what do I
| know.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| There is no speculation needed - the perverse incentives
| are a matter of fact. Whether it has happened yet or not
| is academic. Sure, by some miracle the government resists
| them for now, but that panglossian optimistic view still
| leaves it a ticking timebomb.
| jajko wrote:
| I recall reading report of exactly this at least 25 years
| ago, with grainy images of soon-to-be-executed folks
| standing in the row on some field, blindfolded, hands
| behind the back. Families got receipt for the bullets.
| And just on the side stood ambulances ready to take
| whatever was good and sell it to whomever would pay
| enough.
|
| I don't think they stopped, just got smarter about it, if
| done organized en masse the amount of money is insane for
| people who don't earn so in their entire lives. Nobody
| sane will brag how they got new kidney from shady chinese
| guys when this was well known.
| tqi wrote:
| Just to clarify, in this scenario where the state is
| harvesting organs for transplantation (a complicated
| medical procedure), you are saying that the methodology
| employed was to do it en-masse outdoors with guns (with
| cameras present), as opposed to individually in a
| hospital?
| pessimizer wrote:
| No, it's constantly accused of such by the Falun Gong (a
| religious cult that officially believes that David
| Copperfield is a real wizard), and a lot of western
| governments looking for something to attack China with
| amplify the accusation without any evidence. A good way
| to do that is to cite the conclusions of an "independent
| tribunal" that no one had heard of, whose only concerns
| are spreading the consensus about the evils of China and
| the Chinese, and who are mysteriously funded.
|
| Western governments attack enemy regimes by funding
| religious cults (with associated militias) like MEK and
| Falun Gong (which are allowed to have multiple OTA TV
| channels while the Chinese government are banned from
| most of the internet.) They also fund fundamentalist
| Islam in northern Africa, and neo-Nazis in central Asia
| and eastern Europe.
|
| It's important to dismiss "strong suspicions" from semi-
| anonymous sources and ask for actual evidence,
| circumstantial or not. _Propaganda is supposed to be what
| we dislike about China._ We shouldn 't help spread
| innuendo if that's actually a value we have.
| darby_eight wrote:
| > Black market organ harvesting of live prisoners didn't
| even cross my mind when reading this headline.
|
| It's not that crazy:
| https://www.westernmassnews.com/2023/05/11/getting-
| answers-b...
| more_corn wrote:
| Words have meaning and meaning is important.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Yes, and none of the words in this title mean "illegally
| harvesting organs of live prisoners and selling them on
| the black market".
| idiotsecant wrote:
| It definitely is what I thought of and the headline is
| pretty clearly deceptively cultivating this response.
| sdwr wrote:
| > The title seems to willfully invoke the far more sinister
| "organ-harvesting" trope
|
| That's exactly what I thought this was about until halfway
| through the article - for-profit prisons expanding in another
| direction
| fransje26 wrote:
| > To be very clear: not for transplants, but for training med
| students.
|
| And that is less worse because..?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Because "we took organs to divert into the black market" and
| "we let the med students poke around during the routine
| autopsy for training" are very different things?
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Med students are just the least-bad black market customer.
| segmondy wrote:
| Never can be sure, plausibly deniability. If there was a trade
| going on were 5% were traded for transplants, it would be
| covered up that it's used for training med students.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| These are people who died in prison and were sent off-site
| for autopsy. Organ transplantation is... unlikely.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Stripped of humanity, exploited for labor or whim or scientific
| advancement because - because we can call them criminals instead
| of people. > > It's as simple as that.
|
| Ah yeah. I'd like a rapist to be called a criminal. For victims,
| you know.
|
| It's also as simple as that.
|
| Now should a rapist's schlong be used for scientific experiment?
| I mean... I'd joke that at least we'd be sure he wouldn't use it
| to do mischief anymore but I understand it's a bit harsh. It's
| not what we're talking about here: it's about harvesting organs
| from dead people.
|
| But the point would be better made if _some_ compassion was shown
| towards the victims instead of only ever showing compassion to
| the criminals.
|
| FWIW there are _western_ countries where the corpse of _any_ dead
| human being can be used for scientific experimentation, unless
| specified otherwise.
|
| What about an article about that instead of an article lacking
| any compassion towards rape victims and parents of murdered kids?
| chmod775 wrote:
| > FWIW there are western countries where the corpse of any dead
| human being can be used for scientific experimentation, unless
| specified otherwise.
|
| Examples?
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| >There is an international trend to move from explicit
| consent (opt-in) to presumed consent (opt-out) policies for
| deceased organ retrieval: Chile (2010), Finland (2010),
| Greece (2013), Uruguay (2013), Wales (2015), Colombia (2016),
| Iceland (2019), the Netherlands (2020), England (2020),
| Scotland (2021), and the province of Nova Scotia in Canada
| (2021) have implemented opt-out policies. Switzerland is
| presently considering it, and Australia, Denmark, Germany,
| Israel, Romania, and several states in the USA had been
| discussing this as well.[0]
|
| [0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.27.212620
| 33v...
| chmod775 wrote:
| As far as I'm aware, none of the listed western countries
| (except Chile, whose status as a "western" country is
| dubious) allow the use of organs for 'scientific
| experimentation' without consent. Additionally many of the
| listed countries (Finland, Greece, ...) require attempts to
| ascertain consent for those organ donations, which means
| asking family members of the deceased.
| chmod775 wrote:
| > But the point would be better made if some compassion was
| shown towards the victims instead of only ever showing
| compassion to the criminals.
|
| This is not about compassion for any criminals. They're dead
| anyways. This is about the families of the deceased who find
| that someone has been cutting away at their dead relative.
| 0x112233 wrote:
| What changes would you make to this article to show greater
| compassion towards the victims of violent crime?
| etc-hosts wrote:
| > What changes would you make to this article to show greater
| compassion towards the victims of violent crime?
|
| Your comment made me curious about Brandon Dotson's crime. I
| can't find a lot of info for it, I haven't started delving
| into legal databases, but I was able to gather several
| sources that state Brandon Dotson was sentenced to 99 years
| for a Class C felony (Burglary) + a parole violation. There
| might not even be other people involved in the crime he was
| convicted for. Sentencing someone to life in prison for
| burglary, even with a parole violation, seems needlessly
| cruel.
|
| Alabama's sentencing guidelines for a Class C felony are
| between 366 days and 10 years. The man served 19 years (and
| is now dead).
| aaplok wrote:
| Treating prisoners like animals isn't showing compassion for
| anyone, neither the criminals nor their victims. Refuting the
| claim that even criminals should be treated humanely by saying
| we should also show compassion for victims is not logical.
|
| The victims of crimes absolutely should receive much empathy
| and compassion. They should receive free and unencumbered
| medical (including mental health), legal, and financial support
| to help them reconstruct themselves. Paid for by the community.
| They should be guaranteed safety, even more than the rest of
| the population.
|
| _That_ is compassion. Harvesting their aggressor 's heart and
| brain for teaching purpose, on the other hand, is not.
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