An Oregon death row inmate is mounting an aggressive behind-bars campaign to donate his organs after he’s executed, in part to repay society for the gruesome murders of his wife and three young children.

Christian Longo, 37, says he wants to do more to take responsibility for killing his family and dumping their bodies in coastal bays nearly a decade ago than simply accepting execution by lethal injection.
“Why go out and waste your organs when you have the potential to go out and save six to 12 lives?” reasons Longo, whose voice is measured and articulate on the phone from Oregon State Penitentiary cell DRU31 in Salem.
His request to drop his appeals in exchange for being allowed to donate organs has been flatly denied by state corrections officials, who refuse to negotiate with a killer. It’s been denounced in principle as “morally reprehensible” by the nation’s organ donationClick the image to open in full size. officials and medical ethicists.



“I don’t think we want to be the kind of society that takes organs from prisoners,” said Dr. Paul R. Helft, director of the Charles Warren Fairbanks Center for Medical Ethics and Indiana University. "To do so would be to use unfree prisoners as a means to an end."


Lobbying in media, on Facebook
Longo’s quest, which boasts its own website and Facebook page and was featured in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, renews questions about whether changing inmate donation policies could help ease the nation’s dire shortage of transplantable organs — or whether it relies on an innately manipulative or vulnerable population of prisoners.
“It’s impossible to be sure that a person who is behind bars is making a decision they would make while walking down the street,” says Jeffrey Orlowski, executive director of the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations, the non-profit group that represents the nation’s 58 regional groups.



Ironically, a survey of organ transplant centers nationwide reveals that while taking organs from executed inmates is prohibited, accepting organs from inmates who die of other causes while in custody is permitted, although rarely and under strict circumstances.
Longo probably has a better chance of donating his liver if he's injured or has a stroke in prison and dies later at a local hospital.


In such a situation, even the Oregon Department of Corrections couldn’t stand in the way, spokeswoman Jeanine M. Hohn says. “We would not hinder any such donations.”
Donations after inmates died of injury or illness while in custody have been allowed, though rarely, even in Longo's region, said Mike Seely, executive director of the Pacific Northwest Transplant Bank. "It's happened once or twice in the 20 years I've been here," Seely says.


Transplant advocates, including those who've received organs, say increasing the supply of available organs is the bottom line, and that willing prisoners should be allowed to donate to often-desperate recipients.
"I wouldn't have cared what heart I got," says Hiland Doolittle, a 65-year-old writer from Albany, N.Y., who waited two years before his 2009 transplant. "When you can't tie your shoes, you know you're at the end of your rope."


“If someone is sick enough, long enough and wants to live, they’ll gladly take an organ from someone who was incarcerated,” says Joanne Kelley, president of TripleHeart, Inc.,an Atlanta-based support group for heart transplant patients. Her 58-year-old husband, “Kel” Kelly, died in 2008 after living with a donor heart for nine years.
But death row opponents, doctors and ethicists counter that larger societal questions are at stake that supersede individual demands for organs.


'Too many problems'
“I don’t think it’s a calculus that this life can be taken so this life can be spared,” said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit group that opposes capital punishment. “I think you’ve got to look at the larger picture. The system that gets put in place once the green light is given for that has too many problems.”


But Longo figures that he alone could save eight lives through his death, offering his heart, lungs kidneys, liver and other tissues. That would put a dent right away in Oregon’s waiting list, which includes 768 requests, including 13 hearts, 122 livers and 628 kidneys.
And it could bring down the national waiting list, which on Tuesday totaled 110,772 candidates, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing.



“To be able to save so many lives, that means a lot to me as well,” says Longo.
Such a statement is difficult to square with a man convicted of strangling his 34-year-old wife, MaryJane, and their 2-year-old daughter, Madison, stuffing their bodies in suitcases and then throwing them into coastal waters. He was also convicted of murdering Zachery, 4, and Sadie Ann, 3, by tying rock-filled pillow cases to their ankles and throwing them into icy Oregon inlets in late December 2001.


And it's hard to hear from a man who went back to work at his job at a local Starbucks outlet in the days after the murders before fleeing to Mexico, where he told people he was a New York Times reporter, went swimming and snorkeling, and struck up a brief romance with a woman, according to court records. When he was caught, he denied the killings.
“I didn’t want people to believe it was something I was capable of,” says Longo. “The past is the past. Essentially, over time, my conscience got to me.”


Donating his organs won't atone for the murders, says Longo, who now claims he believes his death sentence is just. It would allow him to do some good, however, perhaps providing comfort to his family.



http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42667886/ns/health-health_care/

I'm not sure what the problem is exactly, unless people are worried that there's going to be some kind of...like John Carpenter's movie Body Bags, the guy gets an eye transplant, and the eye came from a convicted killer and he became possessed and started to act like the killer did until he finally stabbed out his eye...but I doubt that's what these people are concerned with, that the six people who would get his body parts would suddenly turn into killers as well.

Supernova wrote:

I'm not sure what the problem is exactly, unless people are worried that there's going to be some kind of...like John Carpenter's movie Body Bags, the guy gets an eye transplant, and the eye came from a convicted killer and he became possessed and started to act like the killer did until he finally stabbed out his eye...but I doubt that's what these people are concerned with, that the six people who would get his body parts would suddenly turn into killers as well.

I think it's more the idea of them being used as "spare parts". There are some ethical issues. If done properly & at the prisoners request then there wouldn't necessarily be a problem. But what are the odds that it would cease to be by request & become mandatory? Or that an execution would be moved up because some rich person needs that liver? The whole thing has an unseemliness about it.

Although to be honest I believe at some point the US will abolish the death penalty again. There are too many instances of an innocent person being exonerated after years of incarceration. Let's be honest, it's pretty much a given that innocent people have been executed.

I'm not sure this is the kind of power we want to put in the hands of an already corrupt system. I don't trust the government with this.

I don't have a problem with this and I'm not worried about the government harvesting body parts or killers continuing their murderous ways from beyond the grave.

alan smithee wrote:

I don't have a problem with this and I'm not worried about the government harvesting body parts or killers continuing their murderous ways from beyond the grave.

Agree.

If they're healthy and could save a life, why not?

I think they should be given the same option as everyone else who chooses or declines to be a donor. I don't think being in prison means they shouldn't be allowed. And if I'm understanding it right, that's the case. But it should never evolve into something required. I think the language would need to be very specific to keep greed out of it.

I still remember this

Quote :

Gary Mark Gilmore (December 4, 1940 – January 17, 1977) was an American criminal, and murderer, who gained international notoriety for demanding that his death sentence be fulfilled following two murders he committed in Utah. He became the first person executed in the United States after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a new series of death penalty statutes in the 1976 decision Gregg v. Georgia (these new statutes avoiding the problems that had led earlier death penalty statutes to be deemed unconstitutional in Furman v. Georgia). Gilmore was executed by firing squad in 1977.

Gilmore had requested that, following his execution, his eyes be used for transplant purposes. Within hours of the execution, two people received his corneas. Most of his other organs were used for transplants as well. His body was sent for an autopsy and cremated later that day.

My thought is what condition would the organs be in? IF he dies by lethal injection, wouldn't his organs absorb the toxins? I see where both sides are coming from, but if he wants to donate, I don't think it should be an issue. Hes not being forced to donate.

It's Grey's Anatomy (kind of) come to life.

Everything I'm finding indicates the method of lethal injection used in the US destroys internal organs. Excuse me for being cynical (as I have freely admitted before) but I have the feeling this guy has other motives going on here.

If it causes the destruction of organs guess that would explain why organ donation among the death row population hasn't been much of a hot topic in the past.

^ I think it's a ploy to escape the needle too.