Terri Schiavo died this morning. Now everybody will get on with their lives except for Terri and her family. Terri goes to her rest and her family will get on with their grief.

Now perhaps we can turn to making sure that the law is clear on matters not of terminal or end stage care, which wasn’t what her case was about, but on custodial care. I wonder once the disable groups weigh in how the story will change, but I already know the answer – the media will melt and reframe the story.

Tags: Schiavo

In what is hopefully not just one more burning coal in the heap poured on the Schindlers’ head, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta has agreed to a rehearing of their appeal by the whole court.

I have to consider Terri Schiavo’s saga as a terrible judicial and media failure on top of a great personal tragedy. 

The judicial failure is that a judge would make a determination that ends someone’s life on such scant and conflicting evidence and that the courts above would or could do nothing. If she had been a condemned prisoner, the Governor could have pardoned her, but in our truly great legal system, he can’t do anything.  In the words of that famous Christian republican, Nat Hentoff:

Among many other violations of her due process rights, Terri Schiavo has never been allowed by the primary judge in her case – Florida Circuit Judge George Greer, whose conclusions have been robotically upheld by all the courts above him – to have her own lawyer represent her. 

Greer has declared Terri Schiavo to be in a persistent vegetative state, but he has never gone to see her. His eyesight is very poor, but surely he could have visited her along with another member of his staff. Unlike people in a persistent vegetative state, Terri Schiavo is indeed responsive beyond mere reflexes. 

While lawyers and judges have engaged in a minuet of death, the American Civil Liberties Union, which would be passionately criticizing state court decisions and demanding due process if Terri were a convict on death row, has shamefully served as co-counsel for her husband, Michael Schiavo, in his insistent desire to have her die. 
…
In February, Florida’s Department of Children and Families presented Judge Greer with a 34-page document listing charges of neglect, abuse, and exploitation of Terri by her husband, with a request for 60 days to fully investigate the charges. Judge Greer, soon to remove Terri’s feeding tube for the third time, rejected the 60-day extension. (The media have ignored these charges, and much of what follows in this article.) 

Michael Schiavo, who says he loves and continues to be devoted to Terri, has provided no therapy or rehabilitation for his wife (the legal one) since 1993. He did have her tested for a time, but stopped all testing in 1993. He insists she once told him she didn’t want to survive by artificial means, but he didn’t mention her alleged wishes for years after her brain damage, while saying he would care for her for the rest of his life. 

To me the crux of the legal failure is how a single judge can end a person’s life by his steadfast purpose in doing so.

The simple story is woman suffers brain damage and her mental capacity is sharply diminished, althought the exact amount is still in dispute. Years later the husband collects a large settlement partly for him but mostly for the care of his wife. Then the husband suddenly remembers her wish not to live this way and sues in court to not let her eat or drink. The judge hears conflicting testimony on her desires and a recommendation from her original guardian at litem not to stop nourishing her because the husband has two huge conflicts of interest – money and sex since he stands to inherit a ton of money and he is currently bopping another woman but rules that the woman should die as it was her very own desire. The womans parents appeal as most of her family feels that was not her very own desire, but the desire of her ersatz but real in an all too binding legal sense husband. The appeals drag on for seven years during which husband lives with other woman and fathers two children with her. Also during this time the Florida Legislature passes a law which make the state’s governor her guardian, but this law is soon declared unconstitutional by another Florida court. When the original judge in Florida rules he’s had it with all these appeals and sets a deadline when the food and water will be witheld, the publicity really intensifies and the US congress passes a law which allows the woman’s family to have a new day in court but this time in Federal court. The Federal court rules that the family already had it’s day in court so there.

How is this reported in the press? Right Wing nutters want to keep body alive against former occupant’s wishes and will do anything, include appeal court rulings, to do it. And that’s the most accurate part of the reporting.  Tim at Random Observations has a lot more about what you didn’t hear, Power Line takes on the so called GOP talking points, Patterico deflates the phoney baloney polls, and Nat Hentoff gets the last word on the courts and the press:

Contrary to what you’ve read and seen in most of the media, due process has been lethally absent in Terri Schiavo’s long merciless journey through the American court system. 

“As to legal concerns,” writes William Anderson – a senior psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a lecturer at Harvard University – “a guardian may refuse any medical treatment, but drinking water is not such a procedure. It is not within the power of a guardian to withhold, and not in the power of a rational court to prohibit.” 

This isn’t about the end stages of care of a terminal patient but an injustice done to a particular person. I’m not a big Jesse Jackson fan, especially since he shows the ocasional flash of the man he should be, but he is right:

I feel so passionate about this injustice being done, how unnecessary it is to deny her a feeding tube, water, not even ice to be used for her parched lips,” he said. “This transcends politics.” 

Of course, other people have to weave this into the same dreary tapestry they weave every thing into, whether it belongs or not. Like Paul Krugman, who continues to not make sense, as in:

America isn’t yet a place where liberal politicians, and even conservatives who aren’t sufficiently hard-line, fear assassination. But unless moderates take a stand against the growing power of domestic extremists, it can happen here.

Hey Paul, if we really should worry about assassination by domestic extremists, who would get wacked in this case? The judge, liberal politicians, crazy pundits? Nope, I’m not advocating violence, but if anyone were iced, it would be Michael Schiavo because then it would be over – her parents would be Terri’s guardian and they would immediately order proper care be given.

Tags: Schiavo

Now that the US Supreme Court has decided not to issue an emergency order to reconnect the feeding tube for Terri Schiavo, all that’s left is for her to die. No doubt there are other similar cases throughout the country, just without all the publicity. It is a mystery, though not a complete one, why some cases receive publicity and interest, and others languish outside the limelight. This is often cited as a right to die case or a right to life case, but to me it seems more of a lack of proper law coupled with a case of incompetence coupled with a case of husband wanting money and new wife.

My biggest problem with the case is that any court would try to ascertain someone’s intent to live or die based on off-hand remarks and not written instructions when the mechanism for written instructions exist and that a court would find clear intent when there is complete disagreement between a husband on one hand and all of his wife relatives on the other. 

Given her age, I think it likely that Terri never gave much thought to whether she wanted to live or die in this situation, so to fish around in people’s recollections for off-hand remarks and impressions and have her life depend on what one person makes of all that strikes me as the height of hubris and folly. No legal system should have a judge in that position. A judge made a finding of fact about a decision when there is no real evidence that such a decision was ever made. It’s not like deciding who pulled a trigger or who robbed a bank. If anything comes of all this, I would hope that it is every state passes a law to keep such legal wrangling from happening again – and I would use the old legalism, if it wasn’t said in writing, it was never said at all. 

I think it illustrates several things – one of which is that there does seem to be a huge divide in this country. And too often both sides are too busy being partisan to listen to what the other side is saying. Here you have people who don’t have any problems with appeals that stretch out for more than a decade in a death penalty case, and in so doing have no trouble thinking that courts make mistakes all the time, claim that seven years is too long because it’s not like a court would make a mistake.

Another is that this divide is fed by an information gap — the information that the two sides of this issue are using are completely different. I can’t say this often enough or strongly enough, but the mass media in this country is terrible.  Awful. They suck. There’s a reason why the oath to testify is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and no reporter ever wants to be under oath to testify. It just isn’t in them to tell the whole truth and nothing but. They’ve been misinforming me my entire life and it would be folly on my part to expect them to change now. 

So instead we have one narrative told by the mainstream media, of a husband who is heroically fighting the forces of extemism so that he can fulfill his wife’s wishes, and another told in alternative media of a husband who is trying to kill his wife so that he can keep the settlement money and marry the mother of his two children. And on the one hand, the wife’s condition is clearly that of a vegetable, not only is nobody home but the lights are pretty dim; and on the other we have a woman at best not properly diagnosed to at worst misdiagnosed, refused any treatmant by her husband to hasten her departure, who does have some mental capacity. It’s like the bring-out-your-dead scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Eric Idle wants someone hauled off to the ash heap even though he isn’t dead yet. And the mortician does Eric a favor by bashing the guy over the head before taking his body away. Only this time, it isn’t funny.

Tags: Schiavo

Patterico notices something interesting — Judge Greer of Terri Schiavo fame didn’t believe a witness because he thought the witness had his dates wrong, but it turns out the judge had his own dates wrong. But nothing to worry about, there is possibility of judicial error, no need for a fresh look. Yeah, right.

Tags: Schiavo

After the efforts of Congress to get the Terri Schiavo’s parents a new day in court, another judge has dealt a terrible blow by denying an emergency order to keep feeding her. Congress acted because it felt that her parents hadn’t gotten a fair shake in the state courts; the judge ruled that because the state courts had spent years mishandling the case, that was good enough for him. This is just one more example of why I no longer respect our legal system. The criminal system is a game of roulette that pretty much defines capricious and arbitrary, and the civil system is out and out extortion. The judiciary as a group seems to this poorly informed observer to be a combination of stupid, smug, and arrogant. Yes, there are good judges, but they are being overwhelmed by the lousiness of the rest.

I have to say, I’m not wild about passing a law to cover a specific situation like this. I suppose the problem is that on the one hand its poor process trying to fix bad judging, and on the other its a woman’s life at stake. We don’t have consistancy — we don’t want to execute mentally defective people who are criminals, but it’s peachy to starve someone if they are guilty of nothing more than being inconvenient. We have very clear rules on how to pass on a dead person’s property, but we can pass someone on because her husband, who has some clear conflict of interests, wants to say goodbye. It should be simple — in the absence of clear written instructions, nobody should be denied food and water or even medical care for that matter. If you don’t want to live past a certain level of ability, write it down, notarize it, and let people know. Otherwise, you get to hang on. 

We allow executive clemency to handle situations the courts either got wrong or handled poorly in the first place for criminal cases, but not in a case like this. Jeb Bush could pardon someone he thought was wrongly convicted of a crime in Florida, but he can’t keep Terri Schiavo off her own death row. George Bush could do the same for someone convicted in Federal Court, but his hands are tied the same in this case. Frankly, I don’t see a lot of difference between executive clemency and Congressional clemency, which is what the law they passed represents. They are both Deus Ex Machina, and the only defense is that they are used to help the innocent.

Tom Maguire covers the subject like a rug, with coverage of the basic issues of the situation, the media bias on display (with a special shoutout for the NYT), and why this isn’t a case of Right-To-Life hypocrisy. Where does he find the time?

Tags: Schiavo

Terri Schiavo is set to start the slow, agonizing process of starving to death tomorrow. I find it to be a process where a husband gets to murder his wife, collect the money meant for her, and live with his new girlfriend without consequence by using the state as his instrument of death. But that’s just me.  The unvarnished facts are bad enough, without my interpretation.

The struggle is often cast as an extension over the fight over abortion; personally I don’t see it that way. If Terri had left a living will, or made her intentions known that indeed she did not want to live this way, I would support her decision. But the only evidence that she didn’t want to live this way is her husband’s word. Forgive me if I find it hard to rely on given the large sum of money and the other woman involved.

Tags: Schiavo

Terri Schiavo is back in the news as a Florida court decides her fate.  My own view of the case is that her husband is trying to have the her legally killed so that he can take the money meant for her treatment and spend it with his new woman. 

Tom McMahon, who has impressed me with his enormous patience with people who disagree with him (mainly in comment sections of other blogs), has a very moving and very personal post brought on by Terri’s predicament on his son Ryan, who suffered a brain injury leaving him in a similar state. His bottom line: “When will they be coming for Ryan?”

Tags: Schiavo