Yes, that's a bad thing. The Chinese state has a documented history of executing people on demand in order to harvest their organs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go....

Even if you were going to be executed anyway, you obviously have a right to determine what happens to your organs, particularly in cultures like China's, where it's seen as very important that the body remain whole.

Ah, I wasn't aware that they were being executed for that reason. Then I definitely agree it's horrifying.

Regardless, that's a really fucked up incentive structure if ya think about it.

Allowing organ harvesting creates an incentive for executing prisoners.

Dude, you need to consent to having your organs donated.

This 100%. And there's a non-zero chance that a prisoner is only kept alive long enough until one of their organs is needed.

Far from non-zero, that appears to be exactly what is happening.

Hey do you mind if I kill you and take your organs? Is that a bad thing?

I was (mistakenly) assuming that the people were convicted of other crimes (like murder or something), and then the organs were being used post-execution.

Well... There probably was, at some point, some person giving an impression of a judge worthy of a b-movie extra who signed something titled "Death Sentence" and continuing with "Lorem ipsum...".

In other words: It doesn't much matter if these people were convicted or not when the judicial system making those decisions is deeply flawed.

And, of course, there are the additional problems of the death penalty itself being rather anachronistic, and even people on death row remaining humans and retaining fundamental right to dignity, which would stand in the way of using them as spare part repositories against their own will.

So there's like eight layers of injustice until you can get a liver from a Chinese.

Morality of the death sentence aside, I think the underlying issue here is that this may also be a driver for killing people in the first place. For example, the presence of "re-education" camps was brought up again recently, in particular relating to Uighur muslims and more generally political and ideological dissidents, whereby the camps have grown considerably (despite contradicting statements on the international scene) and people seem to get "re-educated" indefinitely.