Terri Schiavo: Judicial Murder villagevoice.com /2005/03/22/terri-schiavo-judicial-murder/ For all the world to see, a 41-year-old woman, who has committed no crime, will die of dehydration and starvation in the longest public execution in American history. She is not brain-dead or comatose, and breathes naturally on her own. Although brain-damaged, she is not in a persistent vegetative state, according to an increasing number of radiologists and neurologists. 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. Months ago, in discussing this case with ACLU executive director Anthony Romero, and later reading ACLU statements, I saw no sign that this bastion of the Bill of Rights has ever examined the facts concerning the egregious conflicts of interest of her husband and guardian Michael Schiavo, who has been living with another woman for years, with whom he has two children, and has violated a long list of his legal responsibilities as her guardian, some of them directly preventing her chances for improvement. Judge Greer has ignored all of them. 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. Terri Schiavo has never had an MRI or a PET scan, nor a thorough neurological examination. Republican Senate leader Bill Frist, a specialist in heart-lung transplant surgery, has, as The New ...

1. Terri Schiavo: Judicial Murder
villagevoice.com /2005/03/22/terri-schiavo-judicial-murder/
For all the world to see, a 41-year-old woman, who has
committed no crime, will die of dehydration and starvation in
the longest public execution in American history.
She is not brain-dead or comatose, and breathes naturally on her
own. Although brain-damaged, she is not in a
persistent vegetative state, according to an increasing number of
radiologists and neurologists.
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.

2. Months ago, in discussing this case with ACLU executive
director Anthony Romero, and later reading ACLU
statements, I saw no sign that this bastion of the Bill of Rights
has ever examined the facts concerning the egregious
conflicts of interest of her husband and guardian Michael
Schiavo, who has been living with another woman for
years, with whom he has two children, and has violated a long
list of his legal responsibilities as her guardian, some
of them directly preventing her chances for improvement. Judge
Greer has ignored all of them.
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.
Terri Schiavo has never had an MRI or a PET scan, nor a
thorough neurological examination. Republican Senate
leader Bill Frist, a specialist in heart-lung transplant surgery,
has, as The New York Times reported on March 23,
“certified [in his practice] that patients were brain dead so that
their organs could be transplanted.” He is not just
“playing doctor” on this case.

3. During a speech on the Senate floor on March 17, Frist,
speaking of Judge Greer’s denial of a request for new
testing and examinations of Terri, said reasonably, “I would
think you would want a complete neurological exam”
before determining she must die.
Frist added: “The attorneys for Terri’s parents have submitted
33 affidavits from doctors and other medical
professionals,all of whom say that Terri should be re-
evaluated.”
In death penalty cases, defense counsel for retarded and
otherwise mentally disabled clients submit extensive
medical tests. Ignoring the absence of complete neurological
exams, supporters of the deadly decisions by Judge
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murder/
Greer and the trail of appellate jurists keep reminding us how
extensive the litigation in this case has been—19
judges in six courts is the mantra. And more have been added.
So too in many death penalty cases, but
increasingly, close to execution, inmates have been saved by
DNA.
As David Gibbs, the lawyer for Terri’s parents, has pointed out,
there has been a manifest need for a new federal,
Fourteenth Amendment review of the case because Terri’s death
sentence has been based on seven years of
“fatally flawed” state court findings—all based on the
invincible neglect of elementary due process by Judge George

4. Greer.
I will be returning to the legacy of Terri Schiavo in the weeks
ahead because there will certainly be long-term
reverberations from this case and its fracturing of the rule of
law in the Florida courts and then the federal courts—
as well as the disgracefully ignorant coverage of the case by the
great majority of the media, including such pillars of
the trade as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The
Miami Herald, and the Los Angeles Times as they
copied each other’s misinformation, like Terri Schiavo being
“in a persistent vegetative state.”
Do you know that nearly every major disability rights
organization in the country has filed a legal brief in support of
Terri’s right to live?
But before I go back to other Liberty Beats—the CIA’s torture
renditions and the whitewashing of the landmark ACLU
and Human Rights First’s lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld for
his accountability in the widespread abuse of
detainees, including evidence of torture—I must correct the
media and various “qualified experts” on how a person
dies of dehydration if he or she is sentient, as Terri Schiavo
demonstrably is.
On March 15’s Nightline, in an appallingly one-sided, distorted
account of the Schiavo case, Terri’s husband,
Michael—who’d like to marry the woman he’s now living
with—said that once Terri’s feeding tube is removed at his
insistent command, Terri “will drift off into a nice little sleep
and eventually pass on and be with God.”
As an atheist, I cannot speak to what he describes as his
abandoned wife’s ultimate destination, but I can tell how
Wesley Smith (consultant to the Center for Bioethics and

5. Culture)—whom I often consult on these bitterly
controversial cases because of his carefully researched books
and articles—describes death by dehydration.
In his book Forced Exit (Times Books), Wesley quotes
neurologist William Burke: “A conscious person would feel it
[dehydration] just as you and I would. . . . Their skin cracks,
their tongue cracks, their lips crack. They may have
nosebleeds because of the drying of the mucous membranes, and
heaving and vomiting might ensue because of
the drying out of the stomach lining.
“They feel the pangs of hunger and thirst. Imagine going one
day without a glass of water! . . . It is an extremely
agonizing death.”
On March 23, outside the hospice where Terri Schiavo was
growing steadily weaker, her mother, Mary, said to the
courts and to anyone who would listen and maybe somehow
save her daughter:
“Please stop this cruelty!”
While this cruelty was going on in the hospice, Michael
Schiavo’s serpentine lawyer, George Felos, said to one and
all: “Terri is stable, peaceful, and calm. . . . She looked
beautiful.”
During the March 21 hearing before Federal Judge James D.
Whittemore, who was soon to be another accomplice
in the dehydration of Terri, the relentless Mr. Felos,
anticipating the end of the deathwatch, said to the judge:
“Yes, life is sacred, but so is liberty, your honor, especially in
this country.”

6. It would be useless, but nonetheless, I would like to inform
George Felos that, as Supreme Court Justice William O.
Douglas said: “The history of liberty is the history of due
process”—fundamental fairness.
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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.”
Ralph Nader agrees. In a statement on March 24, he and Wesley
Smith (author of, among other books, Culture of
Death: The Assault of Medical Ethics in America) said: “ The
court is imposing process over justice. After the first trial
[before Judge Greer], much evidence has been produced that
should allow for a new trial—which was the point of
the hasty federal legislation.
“If this were a death penalty case, this evidence would demand
reconsideration. Yet, an innocent, disabled woman
is receiving less justice. . . . This case is rife with doubt. Justice
demands that Terri be permitted to live.” (Emphasis
added.)
But the polls around the country cried out that a considerable
majority of Americans wanted her to die without

7. Congress butting in.
A March 20 ABC poll showed that 60 percent of the 501 adults
consulted opposed the ultimately unsuccessful
federal legislation, and only 35 percent approved. Moreover, 70
percent felt strongly that it was wrong for Congress
to get into such personal, private matters—and interfere with
what some advocates of euthanasia call “death with
dignity.” (So much for the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee
of due process and equal protection of the laws.)
But, as Cathy Cleaver Ruse of the Secretariat for Pro-Life
Activities of the United States Conference of Catholic
Bishops pointed out:
“The poll [questions] say she’s ‘on life support,’ which is not
true [since all she needs is water], and that she has ‘no
consciousness,’ which her family and dozens of doctors dispute
in sworn affidavits.”
Many readers of this column are pro-choice, pro-abortion rights.
But what choice did Terri Schiavo have under our
vaunted rule of law—which the president is eagerly trying to
export to the rest of the world? She had not left a living
will or a durable power of attorney, and so could not speak for
herself. But the American system of justice would not
slake her thirst as she, on television, was dying in front of us
all.
What kind of a nation are we becoming? The CIA outsources
torture—in violation of American and international law
—in the name of the freedoms we are fighting to protect against
terrorism. And we have watched as this woman,
whose only crime is that she is disabled, is tortured to death by
judges, all the way to the Supreme Court.

8. And keep in mind from the Ralph Nader-Wesley Smith report:
“The courts . . . have [also] ordered that no attempts
be made to provide her water or food by mouth. Terri swallows
her own saliva. Spoon feeding is not medical
treatment. This outrageous order proves that the courts are not
merely permitting medical treatment to be withheld,
they have ordered her to be made dead.”
In this country, even condemned serial killers are not executed
in this way.
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Terri Schiavo: Judicial Murder