Court Proceedings: UAB May Have Also Taken Organs From Other / General Autopsies

Early in 2025 an Alabama Judge ordered that a case charging that UAB (University Of Alabama Birmingham) and The Alabama Department of Corrections worked together to wrongfully take the organs of deceased prison inmates has been given the green light to move forward. The judge cited there is "more than mere circumstantial evidence of conspiracy in the complaints". These practices may have been ongoing from 2006 when they first entered a partnership.

One revelation that has come out from the court proceedings supports the fact that UAB may have also taken / sourced human organs from OTHER /general autopsy subjects (OUTSIDE OF THE PRISON ISSUE). According to lawyer Michael Strickland & AL.COM: "a coroner called him to say that a young girl who died of a gunshot to the head had her pelvis removed during a UAB postmortem exam years ago, and the university was now trying to give it back.

“You can’t just dump them out into the public because you got caught.""

Families of five men who died in Alabama prisons are suing the prison system and UAB (University Of Alabama Birmingham). The inmates had their autopsies conducted by UAB. The lawsuits allege, the inmates’ bodies were sent to funeral homes, where funeral directors discovered they were missing their organs. The lawsuits each allege that the university took, and kept, inmates’ organs without consent of next-of-kin.

According to the lawsuit from the Kennedy family, a representative from UAB told them: “UAB Defendants’ Department of Pathology takes organs ‘all the time.’” The family also said they were told by someone in the pathology department that “UAB is a teaching institution. And every teaching institution that does autopsies keeps their organs.”

While the new lawsuits don’t say what happened to the organs, it mentions an incident several years ago at the medical school. In 2018, a group of UAB medical students were concerned about the body parts and tissues they were using as part of their training that had come from people who died in prison, according to the lawsuit, and took their concerns to an ethics oversight committee.

Several of those UAB students later appeared before the committee and were told that the removal of organs was part of the process for autopsies performed on prisoners. That panel also emphasized that the organs would benefit future doctors’ training and if they weren’t used, would just be thrown away.

“Thus, it was a position of the ethics committee that the autopsy process and the teaching uses of specimens obtained through the autopsy on incarcerated individuals in the current fashion would be ethically permissible,” said the lawsuits.

I also go into the details of my on experience dealing with this hospital: