Heart of the Defense

When Jose Flores drove on the wrong side of the road near Santa Rosa, Calif., and hit an oncoming car, one of the victims, Colenda Ward, 12, suffered irreversible brain damage. Flores, 23, was charged with manslaughter and felonious drunken driving. But there was a macabre technicality. After determining that Colenda had suffered cerebral death, doctors successfully transplanted her heart into a patient at the Stanford University Medical Center.

Well and good, said Flores' lawyer, but that meant that the critical evidence --the corpse--had been tampered with. Further, he argued, "when somebody causes injury and then when another agency because of its actions brings about a premature death, I don't think it is fair to charge a person with manslaughter." The municipal judge agreed. "There is really no way of knowing whether this defendant caused the death of this individual," he ruled, leaving only the drunken-driving charge pending.

For all its odd aspects, the situation was not unique. Another recent heart donor at Stanford had been shot. Andrew Lyons, the alleged murderer, claimed in his pretrial defense that the surgeons caused the death. The judge in that case rejected the argument on the theory that the heart would never have been removed if the man had not first been fatally shot in the head. Regardless of the opposing rulings, Stanford Heart Surgeon Norman Shumway is worried that both cases will discourage the use of assault victims as organ donors. The Flores case, however, will be appealed, leaving it to a higher California court to decide whether a medical determination of death before transplant surgery meets the meticulous requirements of criminal law.

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