Every 10 minutes, another patient is added to list of 120,613 people waiting for organ donations. At the same time, 18 patients on the same list die every day, according to organdonor.gov.

Inmates on death row should not be allowed to receive organ donations, but inmates who want to donate organs should be able to. It is a sad reality that this idea is actually flip-flopped. Many states make the irresponsible decision to allow death-row inmates to receive organ donations, while not allowing inmates to donate their own organs.

In Oregon, death-row inmate Horacio Alberto Reyes-Camarena was placed on the waiting list for a kidney transplant in May 2013, according to an article from ABC News. Reyes-Camarena was able to get on the list because in Oregon, officials are legally required to give prisoners the same medical care as other civilians. This has created uproar in the state since Reyes-Camarena could possibly receive a donation before innocent deserving citizens.

Sad as this seems, similar situations have happened before. As reported by ABC News, a convicted murderer in Georgia received heart bypass surgery that cost taxpayers $70,000.

In addition to criminals being treated before law-abiding citizens, officials are simultaneously preventing death-row inmates the ability to donate organs. The most recent example is the controversy in Ohio concerning death-row inmate Ronald Phillips.

Phillips was convicted and put on death row in 1993 for raping and killing his girlfriend’s 3-year-old daughter. As a last wish, he wanted to donate his heart to his sister, his kidney to his mother, and any other organs to anyone in need.

On Nov. 12, his request was denied by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, according to Fox28 of Columbus, Ohio. The excuses were that the department is not equipped with the necessary tools needed for an organ donation pre or post execution, and the risk for transferring HIV is 10 times higher than the risk would be if a member of the general public donated.

It is upsetting that people who commit horrible crimes can still be helped and treated even when they are on death row. It is even more upsetting that those same inmates who seek to atone in some small way, via donating their organs after execution, cannot. We should be helping those who are innocent, deserving and in need rather than those who are neither innocent nor deserving.

As for the death-row inmates who want to help and donate to their community as their last wish, like Phillips, there should be a way to get around the excuses. Organs could be taken out of the prisoners before they are completely executed or a new execution method could be made that would make organs, like the heart and kidney, viable until they can be safely removed from the body. To prevent the spread of HIV, prisoners could be tested and taken to a private medical facility to ensure healthy organs.

The way states are accepting and denying requests involving death-row inmates and organ donations is wrong and should be changed. Death-row inmates should not have their already condemned lives prolonged, but they should be allowed to contribute to the prolonging of innocents’ lives.

-Marissa Mararac is a junior communication major from Tacoma. She can be contacted at 335-2290 or by [email protected]. The opinions expressed in this Column are not necessarily those of the staff of The Daily Evergreen or those of Student Publications.