The families of men who died in Alabama prisons and were returned without all of their organs sat in court Tuesday, watching as lawyers for the University of Alabama at Birmingham argued that the school’s contract allowed them to keep organs after autopsies. The hearing had mentions of Nazi Germany, rats, artificial intelligence and illegal organ harvesting.
As the family members shook their heads from the audience, their lawyers fought back.
“They are retaining organs without authority,” said Michael Strickland. “There’s nothing in the contract that says they can harvest and retain these organs.”
“You can’t just illegally harvest an organ, and that’s what we have here.”
The families’ lawyer compared the situation to a funeral home taking the skin off a body because they liked someone’s tattoos.
“That’s Nazi Germany, that’s what we’re doing, your honor.”
The comments came during a hearing at the Montgomery County courthouse, where lawyers for UAB and the prison system asked Judge J.R. Gaines to dismiss the case.
A UAB lawyer said the contract between the Alabama Department of Corrections and the university—which was terminated after the lawsuits were filed—was a legal contract between two state entities. Nothing the university did while performing the autopsies fell outside of the contract, he said.
“Alabama law is absolutely clear,” said UAB attorney Jay Ezelle. “It is a state contract between two state agencies.”
He added that UAB, under that agreement, was allowed to keep organs for testing purposes. He didn’t clarify what type of testing.
The families of Arthur Olen Stapler, Jim William Kennedy, Anthony Perez Brackins, Kelvin Lamar Moore, Charles Singleton, Alice McIntire, and Barry Culver are each suing the Alabama Department of Corrections, the University of Alabama system which operates the University of Alabama at Birmingham and its medical school, and other various people associated with those institutions.
The families are represented by lawyers Strickland, Lauren Faraino, Dustin Fowler, and Melina Goldfarb. Strickland and Faraino argued in court on Tuesday.
Ezelle told the judge that the cases should be dismissed on several legal grounds, including that Alabama law gives the prison system and UAB’s Board of Trustees immunity in lawsuits. He added that organs aren’t personal property, so several of the families’ claims were invalid.
Ezelle also said he thought some of the case law included in the lawsuits came from fake “hallucinated cases” and was written by ChatGPT or some form of artificial intelligence.
“In trying to respond, I’m trying to sort through what is real and what is not real,” he said. “What is Alabama law, and not what ChatGPT made up to be Alabama law.”
Strickland, who spoke on behalf of the families, assured the judge that no case law was made up. “I have no idea how to do that,” he quipped. “I’m old.”
Strickland argued against the immunity claims, saying that the contract itself was illegal. He and Faraino cited a state law that allows only district attorneys, circuit judges, the governor, or attorney general to order autopsies—not prison wardens nor prison representatives. He also cited state law that prohibits medical examiners from retaining organs without approval from next of kin.
Following last year’s controversy, the department does not currently have a contract with an outside provider to conduct autopsies. The deaths that do result in autopsies as required by state law are conducted by the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences.
In court filings, UAB’s lawyers have said they could try to find the organs and return them to the families. But Faraino and Strickland said that’s not enough. The organs would presumably be returned in a bag, and then the families would have to pay for DNA testing to confirm their identity. Then they would have to disinter their loved ones, if they had already been buried, and rebury them.
Strickland added that the string of prison autopsies performed by the world-renowned university “financially benefitted UAB.” He mentioned the Henrietta Lacks case, where a woman’s blood cells were taken in 1951 and used for scientific research. According to the National Institutes of Health, Lacks’ cells led to lucrative discoveries from which her family received no financial benefit.
“That’s what was able to happen here,” Strickland said. He said UAB wasn’t even denying they kept the organs—they were only arguing they had the right to do it.
Faraino said she suspects the practice of keeping organs without family notification has been happening since the prison and UAB first entered into their prison contract in 2006. She said UAB’s argument that the whole case comes down to a contract dispute “could not be farther from the truth.”
And, Strickland said, the issue might not just be with prisoner autopsies. He said a coroner called him to say that a young girl who died of a gunshot to the head had her pelvis removed during a UAB postmortem exam years ago, and the university was now trying to give it back.
“You can’t just dump them out into the public because you got caught.”
“They want to hide behind a contract,” Strickland said. “It’s an illegal contract to start with. They violated the law.”
Faraino said, “UAB, it seems, is trying to purge their shelves of organs taken unlawfully.”
The judge said he would give each side several weeks to submit their arguments in writing.
Ezelle told the judge he had spent the morning being called a Nazi, a rat, and a liar.
“I don’t think he called you a rat,” the judge replied. “He said rats were scattering.”
“Don’t take it personally.”
The families
Following the hearing, family members gathered around the courthouse steps with their lawyers.
Kelvin Moore’s family gathered close around Faraino. In their lawsuit last year, the family said they were given a “sealed red bag with a container inside that (UAB) claimed contained Kelvin’s organs.” That happened after a supervisor in the pathology department told them it was the UAB policy “not to return organs to families after an autopsy.”
Simone Moore, Kelvin Moore’s brother, said he wants someone to be held accountable for what happened to his brother’s body.
“Those organs are a part of my brother’s body and a part of your loved one. They do not belong to the state,” he said, as other families quietly agreed.
“This is wrong on every level. We can not ever be made whole. There’s not a day that we don’t think about our loved ones and what he had to go through… we are forever scarred and ever destroyed because of this act. And it must stop, because UAB has run amok. They have run rogue.”
His mother wore a silver necklace with a heart-shaped pendant, framing an old photo of Kelvin. “We are not going to let this go,” she said quietly.
