Instead of being considered for parole on November 16, 2023, Brandon Clay Dotson, was found dead at 43-years old inside his cell at an Alabama prison.
According to a civil complaint filed in the Northern District of Alabama’s United States District Court the following month, his cause of death was deemed undeterminable because his heart was removed while in the state’s custody.
Dotson was serving time for a burglary, when he was found unresponsive in his cell and taken to the Health Care Unit where he was pronounced dead.
Dotson’s family immediately suspected foul play was at hand and that’s why their son ended up dead at the Ventress Correctional Facility in Clayton, Alabama. This led his family to request a second autopsy by a private pathologist. A lawyer claimed the first autopsy results have yet to be released or shown to Dotson’s family.
During the second autopsy, Dr. Boris Datnow had discovered that Dotson’s heart was missing from the chest cavity.
The civil complaint filed lists dozens of defendants, among them Alabama’s Department of Corrections, Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, claiming that they are engaging in illegal, reprehensible and outrageous conduct of retaining organs and tissues from incarcerated individuals who die in state custody without the consent of their family, next of kin, or representatives as required by law.
The state’s Department of Corrections contracts out to the university for some of its autopsies.
Lauren Faraino, who represents Dotson’s mother and sister as the plaintiffs, authored the civil complaint.
“Alabama’s prison system is characterized by cruelty,” Faraino said. “From the moment a person enters the Alabama Department of Corrections, they are thrown into a lawless world of beatings, rapes, drugs and extortion. No other prison in the United States comes close to Alabama’s in terms of violence, suicides and overdoses. We are now learning that the horrors do not end at death.”
In the complaint, Faraino wrote Dotson’s incarceration was tantamount to a death sentence.
In 2022, more than 260 incarcerated people mysteriously died in Alabama custody. This number rose up from just seven people dying in a nine month period in 2015.
It was known as the deadliest year in the state’s corrections history, with death rates similarly paced by the year’s end in 2023, when Dotson died. The rise in deaths was attributed to violent consequences from prison overcrowding and understaffing.
Faraino added, “The state of Alabama has fallen into a pattern of abusing the corpses of those who die in prison custody. The practice of unauthorized organ removal dates back years.”
Last week, Charlene Drake filed a letter to the court saying that the corpse of her father, Charles Edward Singleton, who died in custody in November 2021, had been similarly treated.
“He still had his eyes,” Drake wrote, recalling the state of her father’s body when it arrived at the funeral home. “But all other organs were gone.”
Drake said in the January 3 letter to the court that she had never been contacted by the warden to approve of the removal of her father’s organs.
In an email, university spokesperson Tyler Greer said, “Our school did not perform Mr. Dotson’s initial autopsy and have in no way been involved in this situation.”
When asked if the school had conducted Singleton’s autopsy, as his daughter had claimed in a signed letter to the court, Greer responded, “We do not comment on pending litigation.”
Greer said that the university is among providers in the state that conduct autopsies of incarcerated persons at the direction of the State of Alabama and that following the autopsy unless specifically requested, organs are not returned to the body.
Greer also said, “A panel of medical ethicists reviewed and endorsed our protocols regarding autopsies conducted for incarcerated persons.”
In 2018, an ethics oversight committee met to discuss the university’s practices, after medical students there raised concerns about the “disproportionate number” of organs they were examining from the bodies of incarcerated individuals compared to civilian populations.
In a powerpoint the students presented to school officials, the students noted that the benefits of the medical research that was being conducted on the bodies of incarcerated people are not distributed equally to incarcerated individuals.
The students submitted a series of suggestions to school officials, among them noting that: “organs obtained without consent from the patient or their family should be returned to family members” and that the school “should set a higher internal standard that organs are not retained unless given with informed consent from the patient or their families.”
The committee responded in September 2018 that the school’s “current fashion” of conducting autopsies remained ethically permissible.
When Dotson’s family saw him lying in his casket, they noticed bruising on the back of his neck and excessive swelling around his head. The smell emanating from his body, which had not been properly stored in the week between his death and the family receiving the body, was very overwhelming.
“To date, no one has explained to the family why Mr. Dotson’s heart was missing when his body was turned over to them,” the complaint states, adding that the family still “do not know where Mr. Dotson’s heart currently is, or in whose possession.”
