# Can an organ donor place restrictions on who receives his organs?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-an-organ-donor-place-restrictions-on-who-receives-his-organs/507083>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [August 20, 2009, 3:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-an-organ-donor-place-restrictions-on-who-receives-his-organs/507083 "2009-08-20T15:51:51Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 30

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**Author:** ![Shot\_From\_Guns](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ccd318/32.png) [@Shot\_From\_Guns](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shot_From_Guns)\
**Post date:** [August 21, 2009, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-an-organ-donor-place-restrictions-on-who-receives-his-organs/507083/30 "2009-08-21T21:30:59Z")

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> [@muldoonthief](#):
>
> I don’t know either of those things. I think the great majority of parents don’t molest their children, and I think the great majority of felons committed the crimes they were convicted of. That’s good enough for me.

1.) In another thread, the following was said about the work done by [The Innocence Project](http://www.innocenceproject.org/):

> [@Would you have beaten this rap? Or would you have gone to prison?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-have-beaten-this-rap-or-would-you-have-gone-to-prison/506529/16):
>
> They found that about one third of the prisoners who asked for their help in getting blood evidence retested turned out to be innocent. The other two thirds either supported the conviction, or provided no meaningful evidence. But the real chiller was what he said about all the OTHER criminal convictions, without blood evidence. There is no reason to believe that the rate of false convictions in other crimes is any different from the cases the Project involves itself in. And in fact there is a good possibility that the rate of false convictions is even higher in cases where there was no biologic evidence available.

Even if the percentage is off, you can’t argue with the absolute numbers: In the U.S., there have been \*\*241 \*\*post-conviction DNA exonerations, 17 of them for people who served time on death row. ([Cite.](http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/351.php))

2.) Not everybody who is in prison is a violent offender. Not everybody who was a violent offender continues to be a bad person.

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