I just sent the following e-mail to Dan, with a cc to Neal Shapiro:
First, Dan, the name is pronounced 'she eye vo'.
Second, as to your closing questions ... "But you have to wonder, are her parents fighting so hard because they believe that she can recognize faces, etcetera, that she actually does understand, or is it that they just don't believe Schiavo about what Terri said; could a novel legal and constitutional fight have been precipitated by an old-fashioned feud between parents and a husband?" ... you generate your premises from a perhaps faulty assumption, that courts, because the judge and/or jury reviews a case, find honestly and accurately in an unbiased way upon the facts as presented. You certainly know that a poor judge can make findings that are flawed, that have been based on an arbitrary and very biased elimination of facts which another court or judge will find most relevant (such was the case with the first Greer ruling to execute Terri, for which another judge issued a stay in 2000). Occasionally, perhaps rarely, a series of court rulings flawed because of first-case biases, get issued in sequence, yet each ruling is flawed because of the original prejudices of the first judge or court.
Lastly, since Michael Schiavo has moved on with his life, siring two children with another woman, if Terri is in fact in a vegetative state never to regain consciousness, isn't it the humane thing to do to grant her care to her parents so that they may be with her in her declining years rather than be sequestered away by a man who has left her to pursue his life separate from her? Do the parents trust Michael Schiavo?... Would you trust someone who had been told by medical experts that his wife would benefit from a long-term rehabilitation program (and had seen incremental improvements in his wife's condition because of this therapy), yet upon receiving a $750,000 settlement for such a rehab program immediately forbids any further therapy for his wife, places a 'do not resuscitate' order on her medical chart, and refuses for her to even receive antibiotics for an infection?
Dan, you're young, but I know from watching you over nearly the past decade that you are not naive.
Regards,
XXXXXX XXXXXXXX, Johnson City, TN