JD Crowe: Alabama prisons: Missing a heart, literally and figuratively
This is an opinion cartoon.
The prisoner’s body missing a heart is a grim metaphor for the entire Alabama prison system. The Alabama prison horror story continues to add disturbing new chapters.
From Ivana Hrynkiw’s AL.com story:
The first witness didn’t know where the heart was.
Nor did the second. Nor the third.
No answers as to the location of Brandon Clay Dotson’s heart came during a Friday morning hearing at the Hugo Black U.S. Courthouse in downtown Birmingham.
Dotson was found dead at Ventress Correctional Facility on November 16. The 43-year old’s family members — his mother, daughter and brother — claim in a federal lawsuit that they spent days trying to obtain his body. Once they did receive his body on Nov. 21., the family “suspected foul play, in part because of the Alabama Department of Corrections’ extensive and ongoing violations of basic human and constitutional rights,” said the lawsuit.
They hired a private pathologist to do a second autopsy on the body. That doctor, Dr. Boris Datnow, discovered during his exam that Dotson’s body was missing his heart.
The family filed a lawsuit after that revelation, suing the Alabama Department of Corrections, the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences, and UAB Medical Center, arguing the heart was in some way received or planned to be received by the university. Dotson’s family is asking for the heart to be returned to them and to find out why it was removed in the first place, and under whose orders.
“The heart of a deceased person simply does not go missing in the absence of deliberate illegal activity or gross negligence on behalf of the entity or entities that had possession of the body prior to it being turned over to the family for burial,” said the family lawsuit.
Read the whole story here:
Alabama still can’t find heart missing from prisoner’s body – al.com
Here’s the original story:
Dead Alabama prisoner’s body returned without a heart, family says – al.com
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Alabama prison horror story – al.com
Alabama is a prisoner in its own horror story – al.com
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JD Crowe is the cartoonist for Alabama Media Group and AL.com. He won the RFK Human Rights Award for Editorial Cartoons in 2020. In 2018, he was awarded the Rex Babin Memorial Award for local and state cartoons by the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Follow JD on Facebook, Twitter @Crowejam and Instagram @JDCrowepix. Give him a holler @[email protected].
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