JACKSON, Miss. — A debate is unfolding over an unusual offer from Mississippi’s governor: He will free two sisters imprisoned for an armed robbery that netted $11, but one woman’s release requires her to donate her kidney to the other.
The condition is alarming some experts, who have raised legal and ethical questions.
Among them: If it turns out the sisters aren’t a good tissue match, does that mean the healthy one goes back to jail?
Gov. Haley Barbour’s decision to suspend the life sentences of Jamie and Gladys Scott was applauded by civil-rights organizations and the women’s attorney, who have long said the sentences were too harsh for the crime.
The sisters are black, and their case has been a cause celebre in the state’s African-American community.
After 16 years in prison, Jamie Scott, 36, is on daily dialysis, which officials say costs the state about $200,000 a year.
Barbour agreed to release her because of her medical condition, but 38-year-old Gladys Scott’s release order says one of the conditions she must meet is to donate the kidney within a year. The idea to donate the kidney was Gladys Scott’s, and she volunteered to do it in her petition for early release.
National NAACP president and chief executive Benjamin Todd Jealous thanked Barbour on Thursday after meeting him at the state Capitol in Jackson, calling his decision “a shining example” of how a governor should use the power of clemency. Others aren’t so sure.
Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, has studied transplants and their legal and ethical ramifications for about 25 years. He said he has never heard of anything like this.
“When you volunteer to give a kidney, you’re usually free and clear to change your mind right up to the last minute,” he said. “When you put a condition on it that you could go back to prison, that’s a pretty powerful incentive.”
Other experts said the sisters’ incarceration and their desire for a transplant operation are separate matters and should not be tied together.
