And finally… bad blood

A medical committee’s decision to refuse a kidney donation from a convicted criminal has been overturned by a court on the basis there is no such thing as a “criminal kidney”.

A judge in the southern Indian state of Kerala said the organ transplant authorisation committee should not have examined the donor’s moral character in a secular society.

According to India’s Telegraph, Justice P.V. Kunhikrishnan said: “There is no organ in the human body like a criminal kidney or criminal liver or criminal heart.

“There is no difference between the organ of a person with criminal antecedents and the organ of a person who has no criminal antecedents. Human blood is passing through all of us.”

He said the committee’s decision suggested it believed that “the criminal behaviour of the donor will percolate to the person who accepts the organs”, which was unreasonable.

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