Texas Won't Let Ramiro Gonzales Save a Life Because It Interferes with Killing Him
Gonzales's desire to give life was too unpredictable for the state trying to kill him.
Note: I’ll be out of the country on vacation at publication time. While stays of execution are exceedingly rare from the Roberts Court or Texas Governor Greg Abbott, I’m noting the possibility here.
The state of Texas, America’s most prolific executioner, is set to kill Ramiro Gonzales tomorrow in retribution for the 2001 murder of Bridget Townsend. Like many death row inmates, Gonzales is arguing that a post-conviction religious transformation means that his execution serves little purpose; unlike any of them I’ve ever heard before, Gonzales is willing to put his little remaining capital where his mouth is, requesting a stay of execution specifically so that he could donate a kidney in 2022.
One of the keystone arguments in the non-Eighth Amendment debate surrounding the death penalty that, rather than deterring murders, executions tend to have a “brutalizing“ effect on society. While most of that argument depends on homicide rates, the state’s refusal to let Gonzales donate a kidney so that it could more conveniently kill him may be even more salient.
The Window for Organ Donation Is Too Narrow for Lethal Injection Subjects
Advocates for Gonzales argue that his kidneys will be useless after he is executed because they will be “poisoned with execution drugs.” While this is beyond question—the kidneys function as a blood filter, and the enormous dose of pentobarbital he will receive will render them unreliable—the method of execution is only a small part of why post-execution organ donation doesn’t work.
Organ donation is an extremely tight window, one that excludes almost all out-of-hospital deaths. The standard deadline for in organ donation is 90 minutes1; too late after that, and there’s not enough guarantee that organ tissue has had enough blood, recently enough, to keep from dying. Cardiac arrests outside a hospital setting so rarely produce viable organs that there aren’t really even protocols on how to handle them; I can’t really count the number of cardiac arrests I’ve run, but I know they’ve produced exactly one set of viable donated organs, from an exceedingly rare case where we were able to get pulses back. Even if hospitals were willing to cross a red line in medical ethics and ignore the dead donor rule, they’re likely unwilling to shoulder the extra administrative burden of efficient specimen handoff and rapid transport through a prison setting—especially given how untrustworthy a partner state prison officials can be.
The one nation that routinely manages to harvest organs via executions is not a peer most death penalty advocates would prefer to have. China manages to preserve organs for donation both by obliterating red lines in medical ethics and by fudging the concept of death itself. In China, “neither the common criteria for cardiopulmonary death (irreversible cessation of heartbeat and breathing) nor that of brain death (irreversible cessation of brain functions)” are used to declare an executed person dead; rather, “cessation of heartbeat, cessation of respiration, and dilated pupils” are pointed out within “tens of seconds“ in order to preserve organs for explanation. China then passes the subjects directly on to the operating room, sometimes not even waiting until they’re dead. One consequence of this laissez-faire attitude toward death: members of Falun Gong, a religious movement in the Chinese government’s crosshairs2, refuse to become organ donors even after escaping to America, which honors the dead donor rule.
Kidney Donation Isn’t Easy to Come By
Gonzales would be something of a miracle for his intended recipient. Though blood type incompatibility doesn’t completely preclude transplants, it makes the process much harder; recipients with Gonzales’s Type B blood can only accept organs from other Type B or O- donors, a group that makes up less than 10% of the population.
However, the timeline of kidney donation was too uncertain for Texas. Like every state, Texas must request an execution date, and the execution must take place at the appointed date. The process of finding a recipient, performing the surgery, and recovering was too unpredictable, according to the Texas Department of Corrections.
“The State’s Interest in Finality“ Outweighs the Entire Point
As it usually does in capital cases, the state argued in Gonzales’s appeals that its interest in “finality” outweighs anything Gonzales might have brought up. I’d like to state outright what Texas is slipping into legal filings. The “finality“ Texas will get from killing a man is more important than the unqualified good it doesn’t dispute he could do, and the life of the innocent person waiting for a kidney he’s willing to give. In another case, it’s worth lying to the court because the permission structure the state built to kill a man has collapsed. In other states, it’s been worth the collective psyche of the people charged with carrying it out.
If there’s no cost too high to pay to make sure the state gets to perform the death penalty, I’m not sure more evidence is needed of its brutalizing effect on society.
This is 90 minutes from the withdrawal of life support, not intentional killing, but the heart of the matter (whether organs are perfused) is the same.
Falun Gong is an extremely complicated issue; the upshot for our purposes here is that their organs are as good as anybody else’s.