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If you’re blue and you don’t know where to go to, why don’t you go where fashion sits…
As you probably heard, Peter Boyle (originally from Philly, baby!), died earlier this week. While many probably know him as the pops from “Everybody Loves Raymond,” the more enlightened among us will always remember him from his hilarious turn in Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein.
Where am I go with this?
Body parts, baby; body parts.
This week, the New York Court of Appeals established, for any doubters, that a person does not own another’s organs. In this instance, when Peter Lucia died, his wife agreed to donate Lucia’s kidneys to Robert Colavito, a friend of Lucia’s living in Florida. However, only one kidney got sent to Florida, and it was damaged en route. By the time the other kidney could be tracked down, it had already gone through the New York Organ Donor Network to another recipient and Colavito was stuck.
He filed a lawsuit against the network, arguing that this was a misappropriation, because he had been promised his friend’s kidneys. The lawsuit was dismissed by the District Court, so it moved up to the appellate chain to the state’s top court:
The state Court of Appeals said it relied in part on Lord Coke’s 400-year-old pronouncement “that a corpse has no value” to decide that Robert Colavito had no right to Peter Lucia’s kidney and the New York Organ Donor Network legally gave it to another patient.
Unfortunately, this story doesn’t have quite as funny an ending as Young Frankenstein. Colavito never received a replacement kidney, despite being pushed to the top of the donor list, and he died this past June.
(hat tip to The Legal Reader)
