The state if Indiana executed convicted murderer Gregory Scott Johnson last week, continuing the state’s long-standing tradition of executing men with three names, despite the condemned’s requests that he be allowed to donate his liver to his ailing sister before the execution. Gov. Mitch Daniels denied Johnson’s request on the grounds that it was creepy.
“Who would want a killer’s liver?” asked prison warden Brad Foulke. “Yuck. The last thing we need is some horror movie bullshit where an evil liver turns this girl into an unstoppable killing machine. No thanks.”
After hearing that the state of Indiana had offered to buy Johnson’s sister a dinner of liver and onions as a symbolic way to apologize for wasting the one inside her brother, fans of morbid humor were disappointed to learn that Johnson was executed by lethal injection, rather than by some cooking-related method.
“It would be kind of funny if he’d been electrocuted,” explained Indiana Pacers fan Brett Amrow. “Because then they could have served his liver all cooked up with onions and stuff. I’m not sure if he’d have to eat the onions first or have them surgically implanted or what, I don’t know how the science of it works. I mean, yeah, I know that’s gross, but you ever try eating liver without onions? Yuck.”
The controversy surrounding Johnson’s execution has touched off a national debate over whether or not condemned prisoners should be harvested for organs to save the law-abiding. Johnson, convicted in 1985 of stomping an old lady to death, burning down her house, and eating her cat’s food, was the rare case of an inmate volunteering to offer up his lousy guts to save another human being, though skeptics have suggested it was just the beginning of Johnson’s plan for a piece-by-piece escape from prison.
“The state of Indiana issued me a mandate to kill Gregory Scott Johnson for what he done, and that means every last piece of him,” explained Indiana governor Mitch Daniels. “I’m not to leave no part alive, not a liver, not a little pinky finger, to survive a man who’s done such things. That just wouldn’t be fair to his victim or the victim’s family if Gregory’s liver lived on in his sister, saving her life and mocking their tragedy forever. And that’s one slippery slope to go down, because where do you draw the line? What about a killer’s brain? I’m sure somebody could use that somewhere. And that would be totally wrong, an evil brain turning some good person bad. Or even put in a jar, eviling up a lab somewhere until the technology came along to mount that jar on a cyborg body that couldn’t be stopped even with bullets. Now I don’t know many things, but what I do know is that unstoppable killer cyborgs is not what the people of Indiana were hoping for when they elected Mitch Daniels to office. Not most of ‘em, anyway.”
Though many doctors have suggested that Johnson’s organ would have been useless to his sister anyway, since his was a 44DD size liver a her original just a petit B-cup, the larger question prison officials are asking is if it’s ever right to give a condemned prisoner what they want, or if that defeats the entire purpose of punishing them. This question has grown in recent years with the rise of “reverse psychology” stays of execution for condemned prisoners who claimed they wanted to die, forcing states not to kill them out of a fear of appearing to coddle prisoners. Similar efforts by prisoners begging to never, ever be let out of prison have not yet had measurable effect.