NukeNet Anti-Nuclear Network (nukenet@energyjustice.net)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/59592.html
By THE Santa Fe NEW MEXICAN
April 3, 2007
*Attorney: Organs lawsuit settled*

The final settlement has been reached in a class-action lawsuit over a
government program that harvested human organs from dead people in an
effort to study how plutonium was absorbed in the human body, a
plaintiff's lawyer announced Monday.

The organs were harvested at the Los Alamos Medical Center during
autopsies performed there from 1959 to the early 1980s, court records show.

Dr. Michael W. Stewart, who worked at the Los Alamos Medical Center, has
agreed to pay out $800,000 to families of 304 people whose organs were
taken, plaintiff's attorney John Bienvenu said. Overall, he said, organs
and tissues were taken from more than 400 dead people without permission
from their families.

"It appears that little or no effort was made to obtain the informed
consent either of the decedents before their deaths or their families,"
Judge James J. Wechsler wrote in a 2005 state Court of Appeals opinion.

Stewart's lawyer could not immediately be reached for comment Monday.
Stewart had argued that the claims made against him were barred by the
statute of limitations, court records show.
_______________________________________________________________________
Subscribe/Unsubscribe Here: http://www.energyjustice.net/nukenet/