Er, the people conducting the research who took the organs were at the very least not following ethical guidelines. This is sufficient grounds for punishment in my eyes.

You know if someone ignored ethical guidelines about organ donations in performing medical research it's equally possible that they fudged the results or cut other corners. They've already decided to value expediency over integrity so why do you assume they're being rigorous in every other respect? The whole peer review enterprise depends on a baseline level of probity, and given the questions raised by the reproducibility crisis we could probably benefit from a more skeptical approach.