Organ Donation by Death Row Inmates – Get Ready to Start Hearing More About How it’s “Good” for Everyone

Wesley Smith has two related pieces on an op-ed by a death row prisoner that was published in the NY Times on March 6th.  Christian Longo, who admits to being guilty of killing his wife and three children, wrote to the newspaper to promote voluntary organ donation by death row prisoners.

In Wesley’s first blog post on this, which I’ll be quoting later on, he blasts the concept – a sentiment I wholeheartedly share.  In the second post, he describes the unmentioned history that the NY Times has with Longo and discredited former reporter Michael Finkel.

While I was surprised at this particular promoter of this proposal getting published in the NY Times, it really wasn’t that surprising to see the idea of death row prisoners as an untapped source of organ donors being pushed in their pages.

This issue resurfaces from time to time, usually around media coverage of a specific death row inmate making the request – wanting to donate organs after his or her death or a kidney while alive.

But right now we might be seeing a deliberate push to popularize this idea by at least one player with both money and media savvy.  See, I’ve been meaning to write something about this topic since last February.  February 14th, to be exact.

I was working at home that day with the TV tuned to MSNBC in the background.  I got distracted by the TV when I heard Dylan Ratigan say something about debating death row organ donors after the break.  This was kind of weird.  Ratigan generally covers issues related to business and the economy, and he’s pretty good when he sticks to his comfort zone.  This was a bizarre topic for his show.  Ratigan’s guests were bioethicist Eric Meslin and Ben Goldhirsh, the CEO of Good:

If you highlight selections at the bottom of the video screen, accurate subtitles will run on the video – there is also a selection for a transcript.

This was no “debate” on the issue.  Both Meslin and Goldhirsh gave their one-sided arguments in favor of allowing organ donations from Death Row inmates.  Ratigan, who is generally very articulate, animated and aggressive when on his turf, was clearly over his head and offered virtually nothing in the way of counter-arguments.  It had about as much lively “debate” as I imagine Larry King exchanging views on collective bargaining with the Koch brothers would have.

To me, one of the most important points of discussion that should occur when this idea is floated has to do with what kind of impact the practice would have on the implementation of the death penalty by juries who would know this was a possible benefit.  There is no way I can improve on Wesley Smith’s concerns about the impact of this proposal if it was adopted:

Think very carefully about this.  Do we want the society to have an increased stake in executing prisoners?  No.  Even if one is for the death penalty, the issue should be strictly limited to crime and punishment.  Do we want prisoners deciding to give up appeals early–as here–so their organs are more uselful, because even if they win, they face life in prison?  No. Such a system could subtly skew the system against justice and toward the view that the organs of these murderers matter more than their lives.  It could also impact other condemned prisoners depressed or bored on death row, who would be celebrated if they decided to allow themselves to be killed for their organs–as in the adamantly anti-death penalty Times is facilitating by publishing this piece.  Ah, the noble wife and family killer!

Before Ratigan’s show, I was already familiar with “Good” and Good Magazine.  See, in 2008, the magazine published a story by Graeme Wood, a journalist who is a contrubuting editor of The Atlantic.  His story was titled “Let’s Harvest the Organs of Death Row Inmates.”  Here’s an excerpt:

But by using what the bioethicist Arthur Caplan calls “the Mayan Protocol”—a term derived from the ancient Mayan practice of vivisecting their human sacrifices—the removal of organs would itself be the method of execution. If this sounds inhumane, compare it to current practices: botched hangings, painfully long gassings, and messy electrocutions. Removal of the heart, lungs, and kidneys (under anesthesia, of course) would kill every time, without an instant of pain.

So far, the organs of all criminals executed in the United States have stayed with their original owners. Consider the loss. Someone died waiting for that killer’s heart. Two died waiting for his kidneys, and two more suffocated for lack of his lungs. The liver, split two ways, could have saved two babies. Take the hair, bone, skin, ligaments, and fluids for grafts and transfusions, and all that’s left of the donor’s body could be shuffled off into a very petite coffin indeed. The inmate could allow nearly a dozen people to live, in exchange for a body he wouldn’t be around to enjoy anyway. The math says we should encourage death-row organ donation.

I received confirmation from Art Caplan that he did use the term “Mayan Protocol” and has argued against this proposal whenever he’s encountered it.

I reacted to this article when it was first published, when I became aware of it through a post to bioethic.net.  There was another aspect – an omission – that struck me at the time and still strikes me as dishonest and most likely intentional, as I’ll go into a bit later.

Until the segment of Dylan Ratigan’s show, I figured that the issue had deservedly faded away.  It turns out I was wrong.

In June 2009, “Good” unveiled a short animated feature based on Wood’s article, titled “Let’s Harvest the Organs of Death Row Inmates.”  It’s available on Good’s website, but the embedded video below is from their Youtube channel.  Sorry – they don’t provide a transcript or subtitles, I guess “Good” doesn’t figure accessibility is a “good” enough idea to bother with.

In 2010, the animated feature was submitted to the Sundance Film Festival and was shown there in January, 2011.

I figure it was that last bit of promotion that brought the issue to the attention of the producers of Ratigan’s show and probably the NY Times as well.

The film version makes it clear that the protocol for organ harvesting involves putting a prisoner under general anesthesia and then removing the organs.  The organ removal would be the cause of death.

If that sounds familiar to readers of this blog, it should.  In his own blog, Wesley Smith noted that Jack Kevorkian advocated for this decades ago.  Specifically, in the 1950s, Kevorkian advocated letting death row inmates become subjects to lethal medical experiments under anesthesia.  In the mid-1970s, he switched gears and started advocating organ donation for death row prisoners under general anesthesia.

All anyone needs to do to confirm this is to check the Amazon listing for Kevorkian’s “Prescription: Medicide,” published in 1991:

(From the 1991 Publishers Weekly review on the Amazon page linked above)

Kevorkian gained notoriety last year when he performed the first publicly acknowledged “physician-assisted suicide” by helping Janet Adkins, a victim of
Alzheimer’s disease, take her own life. The method of death was the Mercitron, the “suicide machine” Kevorkian invented, which enables a person to self-administer a lethal injection. In this self-dramatizing, often strident manifesto he argues that “medicide,” his term for doctor-assisted suicide, is an ethical option that should be extended not only to the infirm or terminally ill, but also to inmates on death row. Condemned prisoners, he maintains, should, if they choose, be executed via general anesthesia, with the option of donating organs or having their intact bodies used for medical experimentation. (emphasis added)

Frankly, both the article by Graeme Wood and especially the animated feature come very close to plagiarism – relating Kevorkian’s exact protocol without giving him any credit for it.

It turns out there are a number of online sites devoted to information on this topic.  None that I’ve found mention any of Kevorkian’s numerous articles on the subject or the 1991 book cited above.  For example, Eric Meslin, the bioethicist who appeared on Ratigan’s show to pitch death row organ donation, has a page devoted to the subject.  Anything by Kevorkian on the subject is conspicuously absent.  How is that?  It seems to me that someone who is some kind of “expert” on this subject would know about Kevorkian’s devoted and long-term advocacy, which left a long paper trail, and in that case the omission would be deliberate.  Someone unfamiliar with Kevorkian’s work in this area has no basis to call themselves an expert.

I’m guessing that the consistent omission of Kevorkian’s material by advocates of the “Mayan Protocol” is deliberate.  My guess is that no advocate wants to put people off further by associating Kevorkian’s name with it.

The thing is, I doubt that Graeme Wood has to worry about Kevorkian complaining about theft of intellectual property – even though Kevorkian’s been moved to what would seem like outrageous tirades for less.  And he probably won’t be complaining for having been erased from the history of advocacy of organ donations of death row prisoners via the “Mayan Protocol,” even though he was a trailblazer in terms of his advocacy.

Ironically, Kevorkian and his current boosters, groupies and handlers have worked diligently to erase that part of Kevorkian’s past.  As discussed on this blog, the HBO docudrama “You Don’t Know Jack” played fast and loose with the facts of his life, mostly by omitting the creepiest parts, such as his decades-long advocacy involving death row prisoners.  The so-called “documentary” of Kevorkian avoided the same uncomfortable areas.

So, ironically, it would seem that Jack Kevorkian’s supporters are doing their best to make sure that while they boost Kevorkian and assisted suicide, they do their best to prevent people from knowing those parts of Kevorkian’s past in an effort not to creep people out.  Kevorkian appears to be cooperating with these revisionist efforts in regard to his life.

OTOH, advocates of death row organ donation are doing their best to make sure that no one knows about Kevorkian’s pioneering role in this advocacy – probably because they don’t want to creep people out.

Yeah – the irony, it burns!  It also nauseates.  –Stephen Drake