Heart Donor s Death Raises Legal Problem

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31680, 16 May 1968, Page 7

Heart Donor s Death Raises Legal Problem

(NZPA.-Reuter—Copyright)

HOUSTON (Texas), May 15. While a team of doctors attended a dying 62-year-old heart transplant patient in a Houston hospital last night, an unprecedented legal battle was brewing in the prosecution of two youths charged with killing the donor of his new heart.

The patient, Mr John Stuckwish, of Alpine, Texas, who has since died, was in a critical condition in St Luke's Hospital, when Alfred Lee Branum, aged 18, and Robert Patterson, aged 19, were charged with beating to death Mr Clarence Nicks, aged 36, in a fight on April 23.

The autopsy report says Mr Nicks died from severe brain damage, and this fact is not disputed, but doctors disagree on the time of death. Mr Nicks’s doctor says he died at 11.30 a.m., but a hospital pathologist contends that he was still alive at 1 p.m., because his heart was

beating faintly with the aid of a mechanical respirator. The autopsy shows the time of death as 11.30 a.m.

An attorney for Branum (Mr M. Bray) said: “There is a serious problem about whether a man is dead if his heart still beats. It is incumbent on the State to prove the man is dead.” Branum said: “I can’t understand why they’d take his heart out like that and now try to pin it on me.” An assistant district attorney (Mr J. Moss) said the heart transplants could bring other legal problems. “Suppose you donate your heart and the recipient lives for another 10 years,” he said. “Would your heirs be entitled to sue for a portion of the income earned by the recipient during that decade? “Suppose that your heart does not work in the recipient Could the heirs of the recipient sue the estate of the donor for supplying a faulty heart?”