Hospital Killing to Harvest Organs? Wrongful Death Suit Filed

Because of all of the personal injury and tort cases I see going through our office, I find this case very interesting.

On March 4th, Michael Jacobs filed suit in the District Court of Western Pennsylvania (click here for the Complaint, HT Erie Blogs) against the Center for Organ Recovery and Education (“CORE”) for wrongfully causing the death of their son in order to harvest his organs.  Michael and Teresa Jacobs’ 18 year old son Gregory sustained an injury to the head in a snowboarding accident in New York  in March of 2007, according to ABC News. He was airlifted to a hospital in Pennsylvania where he died and his parents agreed to donate his organs to others.

Because Mr. Jacobs is suing CORE in Federal court based on diversity jurisdiction, the court will have to decide which state’s laws to apply. Here, Gregory sustained his injuries in New York (the family is from Ohio), but the hospital where the alleged wrongful death took place was in Pennsylvania, because the boy was airlifted to that hospital from the site of the accident.  I would think that since the majority of the alleged wrongful conduct took place in Pennsylvania and I would assume that the majority of the witnesses, parties and evidence that relates to the alleged conduct is in Pennsylvania, the District Court will probably apply Pennsylvania law.

According to the Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes § 8301(a), “[a]n action may be brought…to recover damages for the death of an individual caused by the wrongful act or negligent or unlawful violence or negligence of another if no recovery… was obtained by the injured individual during his lifetime… to avoid a duplicate recovery.”

According to Mr. Jacobs, the hospital negligently informed him that Gregory was brain dead before he had actually been brain dead, and that he agreed to have Gregory’s organs donated on that basis. The hospital officials state that Gregory was definitely brain dead when they removed his respiration and began to remove the organs.

It will be interesting to see whether the hospital, in fact, did not follow procedure and whether they were negligent such that the Jacobs will be able to prove, by at least a preponderance of the evidence, that the hospital was indeed negligent in taking Gregory off of life support and beginning to remove his organs before he was actually brain dead.

I think that many people find this story particularly fascinating because they harbor a quiet, morbid fear of having their own organs removed while they are still alive.  The facts of this case may not fully come out until a full trial, but it is indeed possible that the family of the deceased are merely grasping at straws and seizing upon what could be an innocuous discrepancy in the hospital’s records to build a case that may actually be baseless. Only time will tell but I am sure that many of us will be watching it with great interest.

Picture of Gregory Jacobs courtesy of ABC News.