All convicted criminals have the right to have a case reviewed. It would be a denial of due process to allow a person who is appealing to die if the death is medically preventable. If one could say with certainty that an inmate would be executed within six months, no transplant center would provide an organ. That's because duration of benefit is among the criteria for transplants. But in our federal district, the average length of an appeal is 10 years, and only half of death-row prisoners are ever executed.
Transplants can be cost-effective compared with other therapies.
Renal transplantation, for example, is often preferred to chronic dialysis. If society is concerned about wasting resources on inmates, it needs to develop some fair way to decide what medical services to offer. We live in an era of rationing of medical care. The expense of organ transplants has caused Oregon and Arizona to stop paying for them to allow Medicaid coverage for preventive care such as childhood immunizations. If Supreme Court decisions from the 1970s justify state-funded organ transplants for prisoners, then any nonprisoner denied such treatment, arguably, is denied equal protection under the 14th Amendment.