If you promise to love someone with all your heart, can you ask a court for an equitable distribution of your donated human organs back? One very upset New York organ donor spouse is asking the court to be made whole again.
Kidney Pains
Richard Batista, a 49-year-old doctor from Ronkonkoma who graduated from Cornell University Medical School in 1995, married Dawnell Batista on August 31 1990. The couple had three children, then ages 14, 11 and 8.
After Dawnell had two failed kidney transplants, her husband donated one of his kidneys to his wife in an operation that took place at the University of Minnesota Medical Centre on June 18 2001. Richard Batista said his marriage at the time was on the rocks because of the strain of his wife’s medical issues.
“My first priority was to save her life. The second bonus was to turn the marriage around.”
Four years later, Dawnell sued her husband for divorce, alleging domestic violence and infidelity. One week before the divorce trial was scheduled to begin, Richard announced he was seeking a stay of the case until his retained “expert” could give an opinion to the court estimating how much his kidney was worth.
After Dawnell filed for a divorce, Richard wanted the court to either award him his kidney back as part of his settlement demand, or credit him in the equitable distribution the fair market value of his donated kidney – an estimated cool $1.5m.
Florida Equitable Distribution
I have written about equitable distribution in Florida before. In a proceeding for dissolution of marriage, in addition to all other remedies available to a court to do equity between the parties, a court must set apart to each spouse that spouse’s non-marital assets and liabilities.
However, when distributing the marital assets between spouses, a family court must begin with the premise that the distribution should be equal, unless there is a justification for an unequal distribution based on all relevant factors.
In Florida, nonmarital assets include things such as assets acquired before the marriage; assets acquired separately by either party by will or by devise, income from nonmarital assets, and assets acquired separately by either party by non-interspousal gift. Importantly for this doctor’s divorce, will the donation of his pre-marital body part be construed as an interspousal gift?
Kidney Failure
In a 10-page decision, the Nassau County Supreme Court rejected the ex-husband’s request that it should consider his donated kidney as an item of property to be valued in the divorce suit, according to Dawnell Batista’s lawyer.
The court said “marital property” covers a lot of things, but human tissues or organs aren’t any of them. It also said that not only was Richard Batista’s attempt to extort money from his wife for the kidney he donated legally unsound:
“The defendant’s effort to pursue and extract monetary compensation therefore not only runs afoul of the statutory prescription, but conceivably may expose the defendant to criminal prosecution.”
Medical ethicists agreed that the case is a non-starter. Asked how likely it would be for the doctor to either get his kidney back or get money for it, Arthur Caplan at the University of Pennsylvania’s Centre for Bioethics, put it as:
“somewhere between impossible and completely impossible”.
What’s more, no reputable surgeon would perform such a transplant and no court could compel a person to undergo an operation, he said.
The NBC New York article is here.