Lawsuit alleging Alabama officials illegally harvested inmates’ organs can proceed, judge rules

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — A lawsuit that accuses Alabama prisons of illegally harvesting the organs of people who died while incarcerated will be allowed to proceed, a state judge ruled on Tuesday.

The consolidated lawsuits filed by eight families alleges that the Alabama Department of Corrections illegally allowed the University of Alabama at Birmingham to study the organs of their deceased incarcerated relatives without the consent of the next of kin. The families say that the public entities intentionally hid their misconduct.

Alabama Circuit Court Judge J.R. Gaines denied the defendant’s motion to dismiss the case based on state immunity, which protects state officials from lawsuits if they are acting within their official capacities.

Lawyers for the defense argued that the Alabama Department of Corrections and the University of Alabama at Birmingham had a contract authorizing the autopsies. Because the contract was between two state entities, the defense argued, it was protected by state immunity.

Gaines wrote that immunity doesn’t apply if their actions violate the law or when they act “willfully, maliciously, fraudulently, in bad faith, beyond their authority or under a mistaken interpretation of the law.”

Gaines also said that the statute of limitations doesn’t apply for inmates who died more than two years ago if the defendants attempted to fraudulently conceal the alleged crimes.

Attorneys for the defendants did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

Lawyers for the families argued that the contract itself was illegal. They cited a state law that prohibits medical examiners from keeping organs without the consent of the next of kin.

“We are encouraged to see our legal system affirm that no one is above accountability,” said Lauren Faraino, an attorney representing all eight families. “What our clients seek is recognition that harm occurred and a path forward rooted in responsibility and truth.”

After a February hearing, Faraino said the allegedly illegal practice represented a “pattern.” Two more families have also filed separate lawsuits with similar allegations in Jefferson and Barbour counties.

Family members of Kelvin Moore attended a hearing in February about the state’s immunity motion. Moore died in 2023 in Limestone Correctional Facility in northern Alabama.

After Moore’s body was returned without his organs, Moore’s family drove four hours to the University of Alabama at Birmingham and picked up a sealed red bag containing what they were told was their brother’s remains. They buried the bag along with the rest of his body.

“You’re robbing the deceased. We’re responsible for laying them to rest. We probably can never lay Kelvin to rest now,” said Kelvin Moore’s brother Simone Moore.

Between 2006 and 2015, the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Division of Autopsy got 23% of their yearly income from the Department of Corrections autopsies and 29% from the state’s department of forensic sciences, according to a study presented to the Ethics Oversight Committee in 2018 by former medical students. The study was entered as evidence by the lawyers suing the state.

The medical students wrote that the organs of formerly incarcerated people were considered especially useful to study because the diseases were often more severe because of the lack of medical attention in prisons.

In other words, lawyers for the families wrote in a complaint, “it is easier to study a 3 cm tumor than a 3 mm one.”

One of the reports authored by the former students said that a third of the samples in the lab that studied lungs were from dead incarcerated people, the court filing said.

“If this was occurring at a local hospital, if this was occurring at a local funeral home, the AG’s office would be investigating it, not using their lawyers to defend it,” Michael Strickland, an attorney for the families, said in February.

The next hearing is on May 6.

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Safiyah Riddle is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.