This is an opinion column.
What’s happening in Alabama is ghoulish. Like some kind of B movie.
Evasion by the Body Snatchers. Or Resident Retrieval.
Except it’s real life. And real death.
Brandon Dotson died in November at an Alabama prison in Clayton. When his body was returned to Dotson’s family, it contained no heart.
Like the prison system itself, some would argue.
Kelvin Moore died earlier last year at a prison in – dare I even say it – Harvest, Alabama. When his family got his body it was missing organs, too.
And when Charles Singleton, incarcerated at the Hamilton Aged and Infirmed prison in north Alabama, died at a hospital in November 2021, his body was returned to family after an autopsy at UAB.
It was missing a brain, among other organs.
I’d make a Wizard of Oz joke about Alabama missing the courage to address these nightmares, but there is nothing whimsical about this.
Alabama, apparently with the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences as its scalpels, is treating its incarcerated people in death the same way it does in life.
As meat. 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.
Oh, the Alabama Department of Corrections can shrug and point vaguely at UAB, and UAB can shrug and point vaguely to legal documents that appear to give it the right to remove organs for study and instruction. And they are probably safe on that. The best medical complex in these parts likely covered its own parts when it took part in taking those parts.
But there were warnings.
In 2018, UAB medical students worried about the process of extracting organs from people who died in custody and did not give consent. Two of those students, representing a group of 13, went before doctors that September to “seek guidance about the legal and the ethical status of this tissue procurement process and the teaching use of these specimens.”
The students did not get a lot of satisfaction, according to notes of that meeting filed in federal court.
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.
The students were told that in private autopsies – not the ones involving prisoner deaths – family members can opt out of allowing that sort of organ use. UAB ethicists told those students opting out is extremely rare.
“Of over 3,000 cases of gross autopsy performed at UAB from 2011 to present, only four families refused to allow the teaching uses of the deceased person’s specimens,” they said.
But that’s the thing.
The families of these inmates had no such opportunity. They got news of their loved ones’ deaths, and bodies returned with pieces missing.
UAB has insisted it follows the letter of the law. A UAB statement sent recently to AL.com said the school “only conducts autopsies after obtaining consent or authorization from the appropriate state official.”
Whoever that might be.
It went on to say “the ADOC 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.”
ADOC, in another statement to my colleague Ivana Hrynkiw, said “the ADOC does not authorize or perform autopsies. Once an inmate dies, the body is transported to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences or UAB for autopsy.”
The publication Andscape spoke to a former UAB student about how course instructors explained what happens:
“They shared with us that when the prison warden filled out the autopsy request form, they rarely check the box to opt out of organ use for educational and research purposes,” the student told that publication.
That’s been a tug of war, too.
In a federal courtroom back and forth over Dotson’s missing heart, Alabama prison officials said they gave the body, intact, to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences, which didn’t have much of an answer for any of it. It was after a second autopsy, ordered by the Dotson family and performed by a private doctor, that no heart was found.
In more ways than one.
It’s a whole lot of passing the buck. And the bodies.
Because when prisoners’ families have no opportunity to opt out of organ collection, nobody opts out. ADOC passes to UAB or the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences and UAB takes what it will and passes what’s left of the bodies to the only people who care about them.
And nobody in charge thinks it matters at all.
It’s just a body. Just a prisoner.
John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner for AL.com.