Organ Harvesting in Ohio

When I say, as I do, that you never know what will happen until it does, well, I could be talking about Ronald Phillips.

Yesterday's news was that Ronald Phillips wanted to donate his organs - kidney to his mother, heart to his sister, the rest of them to whoever - and that DRC said he couldn't.  It was too tough to figure out how to harvest his organs and then kill him.  I wrote about that yesterday, noting that they could do it if they wanted, but also discussing the fact that no state has yet allowed a person on the cusp of execution to become an organ donor.

That was then.  This is now.

   PRESS RELEASE_ Kasich Stays Execution of Ronald Phillips to Assess Medical Feasibility of Organ Donation -...

OK, sis won't get the heart.  But mom just might get a working kidney.  Someone else might pick up a lung or a cornea or -- hell, I don't know. 

Ohio was the first state to use a single drug to kill.  It was set to be the first state to kill with a mix of midazolam and hydromorphone.  It's the state, as I said the other day, that does the most extreme long-range planning of executions as we have prospectively dead bodies lined up through January 2016.

And now we're set to be the first state to actually defer an execution so that the guy's organs can be harvested.  Not, of course, any harvesting that would kill him.  He mustn't die doing good.  The killing, the murder, must be clean, direct, performed by prison guards, in our name.

I'm not being an apologist.  What Ron Phillips did, his brutal rape and murder of Sheila Marie Evans, was surpassingly horrific.  But this isn't about excusing him.  Noone seriously suggests that.  But here in Ohio, "The Heart of It All" as one of our tourist slogans says, enormity begets enormity, blood will have blood.  Though it cannot undo.

Still, Ron Phillips may be able to give his mother a working kidney.  Some kid might get to see because of him, someone else to breathe.  And then . . . .

Come July 2, we'll once again be attending vigils and watching, and waiting.  While they pump the drugs.

From King Lear, Act III, Scene ii.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, an germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!