Death row as source for organ donations?

March 15, 2006

Claude Lewis is a longtime Philadelphia journalist.

On any given day in America, at least 94,000 anxious and often demoralized citizens live with diminishing hope. They are literally running out of time as the search for life-saving organs goes forward without immediate success.

These citizens face a desperate battle to obtain a healthy heart, kidney, lung, liver or other life-sustaining tissue. Modern technology has made it possible through transplantation to save lives that would otherwise be lost. While more and more organs are being donated, demand continues to outstrip supply.

The result has been that thousands of would-be recipients -- including many young children -- die each year while on waiting lists. It's a race to find enough organs, organs that match, and find them in time.

Resources for such organs continue to be severely limited. Life-saving donations are available in several unlikely places -- including our nation's death rows, where many healthy organs go to waste. It is no small irony that while thousands of Americans die needlessly each year because they lack the requisite organs, others go to their deaths carrying off healthy organs needed to sustain life.

Does such a suggestion sound macabre? That death row could provide a significant number of needed organs if a program were scrupulously developed and carried out among condemned inmates? Suppose, for example, an inmate facing a death sentence were allowed to donate a major organ in exchange for a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Hundreds of organs might be harvested. A carefully run plan could -- and should -- be developed to save lives instead of wasting healthy organs.

If the nation is going to remain intransigent in its refusal to eliminate the death penalty, why not make the most of such sentences by allowing prisoners to make a significant contribution toward the lives of others? Even if that contribution is made with less than pure altruism, the good done would be real.

Legal, ethical and moral questions come immediately to mind -- but none is insuperable. Meaningful programs could be developed with suitable controls to protect those who might, in some ghastly way, be victimized. Safeguards and controls could be created to ensure the ethical and moral probity of such programs. For example, so long as the death penalty persists, we could deny organ-for-life exchanges if an inmate's crimes were deemed too heinous. True, it seems like a devil's bargain at first glance, since the choice being offered to the inmate is so stark that it's hardly a choice at all. One might even see it as coercion or victimization of the donor pool. On the other hand, the alternative is death. Some donor inmates would live the rest of their lives with single kidneys or lungs or partial livers, but many donors have lived full lives under the same conditions.

If such a plan was enacted, two lives would be saved: the life of an innocent individual who would surely die without the transplant, and the life of the inmate who once was slated for death.

As life expectancy extends and transplant techniques improve, the need for organs will inevitably increase. The search for such donations must be broadened. To extend that search to our prisons is to affirm, not deny, the value of life.

Why refuse such an idea simply because we are not yet comfortable placing the value of life on a higher plateau than our need for vengeance and death?

Copyright © 2006 The Philadelphia Inquirer.

This article posted April 8, 2006.