Should inmates executed on death-row have all of their viable organs/tissues harvested for transplantation?
No. It would be unethical to recover organs if the person did not consent, it could be seen as a process whereby we are killing inmates JUST to get their organs, and we would never want there to be even the appearance of impropriety. Besides, most inmates that are on death row probably have led lives that don’t make them great candidates for donation with risky behaviors like potentially unprotected sex with lots of partners, drug abuse, etc. Lastly, if the inmate dies from electric shock or intravenous drugs, the organs will stop functioning. Donors are generally people who have some kind of trauma to the head, they make it to the hospital, get put on a ventilator, but the trauma is too much and they have brain death. So they are dead, but their heart keeps pumping blood and oxygen to the organs with the help of the ventilator machine.
