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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
‘Wild, wild west.’ Families say organs of deceased Alabama inmates
have been removed without their consent
By Isabel Rosales, Chris Youd and Ray Sanchez, CNN
Updated:
6:25 AM EDT, Thu April 18, 2024
Source: CNN
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 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.
The state Department of Corrections and the University of Alabama at
Birmingham now face disturbing allegations from the families of five
inmates whose organs were removed and reportedly kept without consent,
according to lawsuits filed last week in Montgomery County Circuit
Court. A lawyer for the families alleged the organs were retained for
teaching purposes.
“It’s the wild, wild west. There’s no governance,” Lauren
Brinkley-Rubinstein, an associate professor at the Duke University
School of Medicine and an expert on prison standards, said of the
allegations involving the handling of inmate organs in the prison
system.
“It’s like, the provision of health care. No standards. What that
health care should look like, who has bodily autonomy and who
doesn’t, and who, when someone dies, acts as next of kin to people
who are incarcerated – all those things are just undefined. There’s
no standard and there’s no oversight.”
Prison warden empowered to give consent, lawsuits say
The Alabama Department of Corrections is the largest law enforcement
agency in the state, with 28 facilities and nearly 2,000 officers.
The University of Alabama at Birmingham Heersink School of Medicine
bills itself as one of the nation’s top academic medical centers
for research, education and clinical care. It houses one of America’s
largest academic hospitals.
Under an agreement between two state institutions with divergent
missions, UAB said it conducts autopsies for the corrections
department, which is “responsible for obtaining proper authorizations
from the appropriate legal representative of the deceased.”
“The authorization forms not only provide permission for the autopsy,
but also specifically include consent for the removal of organs or
tissues for diagnostic or other testing including final disposition,”
said UAB in a statement, adding that privacy laws prevented comment on
specific autopsies.
A case of finger-pointing has broken out between the university and
the corrections department on the issue of who ultimately authorizes
autopsies.
UAB also said it doesn’t comment “on pending or threatened
litigation,” but it complies with laws governing autopsies and is
responding to “incorrect and misleading assertions” about the
procedures it performs for the corrections department.
“UAB only conducts autopsies after obtaining consent or authorization
from the appropriate state official,” the statement said.
The Alabama Department of Corrections also declined comment on pending
litigation but said it does not authorize or perform autopsies. UAB has
maintained that corrections authorizes inmate autopsies.
“Once an inmate dies, the body is transported to the Alabama
Department of Forensic Sciences or (the University of Alabama at
Birmingham) for autopsy, depending on several factors, including but
not limited to region and whether the death is unlawful, suspicious, or
unnatural,” the corrections department said in a statement.
Birmingham attorney Lauren Faraino said the families she represents in
the five suits insisted to her that none of the inmates were organ
donors, nor were their families asked for authorization to retain the
organs. At least two other lawsuits were being prepared, she said.
Instead, the attorney said, UAB’s own autopsy authorization form –
which CNN has obtained – empowers a prison warden to give consent
“without limitations” for the autopsy as well as the final
disposition of an inmate’s organs. She said that means UAB gets to
keep and dispose of the organs as it sees fit unless told otherwise.
Under an autopsy agreement between corrections and the UAB Board of
Trustees dating to around 2005, the warden signs off as the
“legally designated representative and therefore am legally entitled
to grant permission for the completion of an autopsy and the removal of
organs or tissues for further study on said inmate.”
“l do, therefore, give my permission for the performance of an
autopsy including the removal of organs or tissues from said inmate for
diagnostic or other testing, including final disposition thereof,”
reads the autopsy authorization form.
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.
In 2023, Alabama prisons reported a record high 325 deaths, according
to the a non-profit criminal justice reform advocacy group.
The law center reported 1,045 deaths in state prisons from April 2019
– when the on prison conditions – through the end of last year,
citing Alabama Department of Corrections figures and Appleseed data.
“Defendants’ appalling misconduct is nothing short of grave robbery
and mutilation,” the lawsuits said. The state institutions are
accused of fraud, conspiracy, negligence, unauthorized donations of
body parts, unjust enrichment, failing to notify next of kin when
retaining organs and other counts.
requires medical examiners to notify next-of-kin if they will retain
a deceased person’s organs to determine identification or the cause
or manner of death. They also need the approval of next-of-kin to keep
organs for research or other purposes.
A bill now making its way through the state legislature would make a
punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
“If organs are being removed for donation for medical education,
research or any other purpose without appropriate authorization that is
both a legal failing and a moral failing,” said Brendan Parent, a
lawyer and director of the transplant ethics and policy research
program at NYU Langone.
“There’s no reason to believe that a warden of a prison has
ownership or property rights to a body just because the person was
incarcerated. And so the laws that exist protecting the family’s
right to represent the donation wishes, and to represent the burial
wishes or laying to rest wishes, those remain.”
In its statement, UAB insisted it “does not harvest organs from
bodies of inmates for research.” Its pathology program is accredited
by the College of American Pathologists and staffed by physicians
certified by the American Board of Pathology, UAB said.
“The dead are voiceless. And so that creates both a major sort of gap
in bringing these stories to light,” Parent said.
“It’s incredibly sad but makes sense that there isn’t nearly
enough oversight or attention to this because of the vulnerability and
lack of representation of the rights of these individuals.”
did not mention issues with missing organs but said the state
corrections department did not have a reliable system of tracking
in-custody deaths.
Federal investigators identified at least 30 deaths that were not
disclosed to the Justice Department. The report also found Alabama
Department of Corrections did not maintain a centralized repository
for all autopsies and did not have a way to identify patterns in
causes of death.
‘We felt ashamed’
A group of UAB medical students questioned the ethics of the school’s
retention of some inmate organs without consent as far back as 2018, a
year before the scathing federal report on overall prison conditions.
In a letter to the UAB hospital ethics committee and medical school
administrators in July 2018, a group of medical students wrote to
“express our concern regarding the consent process for use of organs
from incarcerated individuals in our preclinical education.”
“Our concern is not with the practice of autopsy, but with the
process of consent for the retention and use of tissue samples,” the
medical students wrote in the letter.
“Wardens can limit the autopsy to a strict determination of cause of
death, with no tissues retained for research or education. However, by
the Division of Autopsy director’s assessment, wardens always sign
‘no limitations’ on the form that initiates the request for
autopsy. If our understanding is correct, neither the patient, nor
their family, has consented to or been directly informed of the
retention of tissues for teaching, education, or research.”
Faraino called the letter and other records of meetings with school
officials “concrete evidence that the students are using some of
these organs for training in medical school.”
“We can all agree that we want doctors who are trained and who have
access to these organs to perfect their craft,” Faraino said. “What
we don’t want is for doctors and pathologists to be mining bodies
without family permission.”
Two of those UAB medical students spoke with CNN, saying pathology
lab instructors acknowledged that many teaching samples came from
inmates, particularly because of the more dramatic pathology of the
prisoners. The students asked not to be named for fear of repercussions
to their careers.
“It’s plainly and obviously wrong,” one student said. “There is
no understanding of medical ethics in which this is permissible.“
A disproportionate number of organ samples were from deceased
prisoners, the students said. Those samples included brief bios
indicating the person died in a correctional facility and some health
history.
“We are benefiting from medical inequity,” one student said.
“These people are dying sicker, dying with less care and they look
sicker, their bodies look sicker and we get to learn from that.
That’s supposed to be a win for us?”
The students said the university ethics committee ultimately dismissed
their concerns.
A September 2018 response from the ethics committee said organs are
“used for the secondary purposes of teaching future physicians and
thereby benefits future patients. If such uses are disallowed, these
specimens would only be disposed of, serving no useful purpose.” The
committee concluded there is “no evidence that deceased prisoners are
treated unfairly as compared with non-prisoners in the autopsy
procedure.”
“It is hard to see any lack of ethicality in the retention and
teaching uses of once-removed organs,” the response said.
UAB in their statement said the medical students’ concerns were
“informed by inaccurate data and information.” A panel of medical
ethicists reviewed and endorsed UAB’s protocols for autopsies on
incarcerated persons, the university said.
UAB said its pathologists in “some cases” keep organs for further
testing to determine an accurate cause of death. UAB said it does not
use inmate organs to teach medical students.
“We felt ashamed,” one medical student said. “All of us carried
it for years.”
Another added, “It has continued to follow me all these years,
wondering if I should or could have done more.”
The families question why the organs were missing for most of the
inmates, and what UAB did with those organs after the work was
completed.
‘Well, we do it all the time’
On April 13, 2023, inmate Jim Kennedy Jr. died at the age of 67 in an
Alabama prison, where he was serving a sentence of 300 years for rape,
sodomy and kidnapping. A prison chaplain notified his family of the
death about four days later, according to the lawsuit.
A funeral director told family members his internal organs were
missing. Only the eyes remained.
Marvin Kennedy, who held power of attorney over his brother’s
affairs, said the family had not authorized the retention of the
organs.
“They made the decisions for you or represented you without your
permission in different areas,” Marvin Kennedy said of UAB and prison
officials. “And that’s really what really hurts.”
Sara Kennedy demanded answers from UAB and prison officials. “I had a
lot of questions,” she said.
When she reached a UAB autopsy department on the phone to ask that her
brother-in-law’s organs be returned, she secretly recorded the
six-minute conversation.
“We’ve never had this request done before,” the supervisor told
her in the recorded call.
“To have the organs back?” she asked.
“Yeah, we’ve never.”
“Who buries somebody without their organs?”
“Well, we do it all the time.”
“We don’t want to do it … We don’t want to do that.”
“Now, I will tell you this … UAB is a teaching institution and any
teaching institution that does autopsies, keeps their organs.”
“Well, we did not. We did not and Junior did not want that … We
have not agreed with the prison for his body to be turned over for no
study. And we want those organs back,” Sara Kennedy told the
supervisor.
Stapler died on September 23, 2023. He had been housed at Hamilton
Aged and Infirmed Center, where he was doing 10 years for child sex
abuse. The cause of death was listed on his autopsy report as
congestive heart failure.
The private pathologist hired by his son discovered he had “an empty
cavity” in place of his organs.
“There was nothing there,” Billy Stapler said.
Stapler also reached the UAB autopsy department supervisor by phone
and arranged for some of his father’s organs to be returned.
“I’m asking where’s the rest of his organs? And he tells me that
they possibly got thrown away,” Billy Stapler recalled. “And I’m
like, how do you throw away organs? … Why did you even take them out
of him?”
Anthony Perez Brackins, 36, who was serving a 21-year sentence for
armed robbery, died at Limestone on June 28, 2023, according to his
mother, Susie Duncan, and sister, Letesha Brackins. The cause of death
was listed as an accidental drug overdose.
After an autopsy at UAB, Duncan and Brackins said, a funeral home
informed the family that the body had been “emptied” of all organs.
Duncan said her son was cremated without his organs. He was not an
organ donor and UAB did not ask for her consent to keep the organs,
according to Duncan.
When Brackin’s family contacted UAB to demand the return of his
organs, a UAB employee told a relative it was “too late now,”
according to the lawsuit.
Kelvin Moore was 42 when he died on July 21, 2023, at Limestone. His
family said he was serving a sentence of life without parole for
convictions for attempted murder and attempted burglary. A chaplain
informed his mother of the death three days later, telling her the
cause was a fentanyl overdose, the lawsuit said.
When his family received his body, the mortician discovered most of his
internal organs were gone. Relatives later picked up a red viscera bag
with what UAB said were his organs. Moore was laid to rest with the
bag.
“I call it thievery. I call it barbarism,” said one of Moore’s
brothers, Simone.
Simone Moore remembered the words of his 82-year-old mother, Agolia:
“She said, ‘You can’t even die no more. Even in death, people
robbing you and disrespecting you. Robbing you of your organs. Even in
death.’ ”
This story was reported by CNN’s Isabel Rosales and Chris Youd in
Alabama and Ray Sanchez in New York. It was written by Sanchez.
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