Posted on 12/29/2004 7:16:22 AM PST by floriduh voter
The Terri Schindler Schiavo Daily Threads are created month to month as we watch local and national news regarding Terri and her family.
Since Terri's supporters are in every time zone, you may see something FIRST. Please share news with us that you don't see here already. Now, why would you want to do that? Terri's Daily Thread for September/October of 2004 was viewed over 15,000 times. Terri's November Daily Thread was viewed over 6,000 times. December's thread is over 3,000 views.
More and more good folks are finding out about Terri and that judicial tyranny would take her life, but for lots and lots of prayer and non-stop lobbying of relatives, friends, clergy, our leaders, the media, a passerby, a cashier - ANYONE who you feel comfortable chatting with.
Folks always want to know how can this be in America or on earth for that matter? Unfortunately, this is really happening to an innocent woman who just celebrated her 41st birthday. She's not the only one but she's the one with devoted parents and siblings who knows what's in Terri's heart. Terri has a strong will to live. That's apparent. It's been 14 years.
Besides, feeding tubes have been around practically since the Civil War. They are not high tech devices. Terri is "not hooked up to machines". Her feeding tube is the diameter of a piece of spaghetti.
Talkin' about Terri is the best way to lobby for her. It is a salespitch to save her life and subsequently, many lives. If you've never sold anything in your life, START NOW. START WITH TERRI.
See Terri's flash movies if you need more information. You can see for yourself that's she's interactive and follows the doctor's instructions.
Visit: http://www.terrisfight.org
NOTE: Terri's December Dailies are noted as a source above. There are lots of important links at the very top of that thread. If you missed Terri's Celebration of Life, you can click on it from there.
Interesting and well done!
You are ALL truly AWESOME. Please keep up the excellent, excellent work!
Today: January 27, 2005 at 13:45:12 PST
Settlement Unlikely in Right-To-Die Case
By VICKIE CHACHERE
ASSOCIATED PRESS
TAMPA, Fla. (AP) - While the two sides in the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case have been fighting bitterly in court, all along they have been quietly exchanging offers of a settlement.
But as the court case nears a critical point, there appears to be little chance they can come to terms over the fate of the 41-year-old woman who has suffered such severe brain damage she must be fed through a tube.
Attorneys said in interviews this week there that is too much distrust and there are too many sticking points between husband Michael Schiavo and his in-laws, Bob and Mary Schindler.
Michael Schiavo wants to have his wife's feeding tube removed, arguing that she is in an irreversible vegetative state and that she did not want to be kept alive by artificial means. Her parents have struggled to keep her alive in a court fight has raged for more than seven years and involved scores of court decisions and appeals.
"It's been made very clear to me by the Schindler attorneys that there is no possible settlement that the parents would agree to that might result in Terri's death," said George Felos, Michael Schiavo's attorney.
The Schindlers have offered to give their son-in-law whatever money remains in their daughter's medical trust fund if he were to walk away.
"They offered to give him everything and they would pay all the costs of her rehabilitation and her care - even if he wanted to stay married to her and inherit everything," said Barbara Weller, the Schindlers' attorney.
But Michael Schiavo's attorney said the legal fight is not about money, but about Michael Schiavo's vows to his wife to carry out her wishes. Terri Schiavo is not "chattel," to be bargained away, Felos has said.
A key hearing on her fate is set for Friday in a Florida court.
Terri Schiavo, 41, suffered severe brain damage in 1990 when her heart stopped beating because of an eating disorder.
Michael Schiavo has twice been granted permission to remove the feeding tube that keeps her alive, and twice has had her death interrupted by legal maneuvers.
Her parents do not believe she is in a persistent vegetative state, and contend she interacts with them.
Michael Schiavo never mentioned his wife's wishes until after the couple were awarded more than $1 million in medical malpractice claims. He stood to inherit that money if his wife died, though after years of litigation most of it is gone.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to step in and keep Schiavo hooked to a feeding tube. The ruling effectively ended Gov. Jeb Bush's efforts to use his authority to keep her alive.
As recently as Thanksgiving, the two sides have offered proposals that would involve bringing in new, independent medical experts to evaluate Terri Schiavo.
While both sides at different times might have agreed to that review, they have never been able to find common ground on the details of how those exams would take place, who would do them and how the information would be used once the doctors reported back, the attorneys said.
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On the Net:
Terri Schindler-Schiavo Foundation: http://www.terrisfight.org
Terri ping to 1563 and 1564! If anyone wants to be on/off my Terri ping list, please let me know by FReepmail.
Thanks for the info!
too much distrust
Wow, why would anyone "distrust" Michael R. Schiavo? He is so popular in FL that people routinely stamp for approval his choice of liberal judges.
Would it be better to pick several places to target so that they receive a large volume of calls and might be more likely to listen?
It's ridiculous. Murderers on death row have greater legal recourse than an innocent woman who is guilty of nothing.
Wouldn't it be wiser to target those numbers? We could compile a list of no more than ten numbers and concentrate on those.
I don't know what's going on but I once started a thread for another poster and when questions were raised on the post, I was left out to dry. The person did not answer the questions. I won't make that mistake again.
You're much better off doing your own research as you indicated.
How big is the Empire Journal? Are you one of the reporters? I really liked the story on convening the Grand Jury. Has the DOJ contacted the paper yet?
Estelle Browning, Felos claim to fame! I posted something on that earlier today on another thread.here it is,...
This is really long but does touch on the Browning case and mentions that our black robed FL Supremes "extended the living-will option to patients who weren't terminally ill."
Last Wish: The Rise of the Right to Die
A nationwide study charts the political growth of Americans' angst over the last right.
by Kim MacQueen
Estelle Browning figured she had taken care of her last wishes rather well. In 1985, the 85-year-old Dunedin, Florida woman had written a living will stipulating that, should she become ill and unable to make medical decisions for herself, she didn't want to be kept alive by machines or fed artificially.
Just a year later, Browning suffered a massive stroke and landed in exactly that predicament. As she lay in pain in her hospital bed, lapsing in and out of consciousness and being fed through a tube, her legal guardian, hospital staff, lawyers and the courts hashed out whether or not to obey her wishes and disconnect her life support.
Browning's case had slipped through a loophole in Florida's law that allowed for only terminally ill patients to refuse life-sustaining treatment, living will or no. Browning wasn't "terminal," but her condition promised little hope for recovery. She spent three years in a semi-vegetative state, suffering from bleeding, vomiting, bedsores and other chronic problems. Finally in 1990, in Guardianship of Browning v. State of Florida, the Florida supreme court extended the living-will option to patients who weren't terminally ill. But the ruling didn't come soon enough for Estelle Browning. She had died in 1989, after three years under anguished circumstances she had carefully planned to avoid.
Though it was clearly a watershed decision on the right- to-die issue in Florida, the ruling failed to tie up all of the state's loose ends on the subject. The case touched off a melee of Florida lawmakers, lobbyists, and special interest groups, a fight that continues today with no popular--or legal--consensus in sight.
Florida's struggle with this emotionally charged question bears watching from a national perspective, argues FSU political scientist Dr. Henry R. Glick (Ph.D. Tulane). In one of the latest commentaries on the hotly debated right-to-die issue, Glick depicts Florida, with its high elderly population, as a bellwether state in bringing the issue to the fore in national politics.
In The Right to Die: Policy Innovation and its Consequences (1992, Columbia University Press), Glick relies on developments in Florida, California and Massachusetts and other states to show how legal wrangling over treatment withdrawal, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide has crested at state and national levels. The book is seen as the first to chronicle the emergence of Americans' legally recognized right to die from the issue's appearance on the political horizon in the 1960s to its present state of conflict in the national conscience and the courts.
Many states have right-to-die laws these days, but they vary from state to state, Glick says. Few are considered "comprehensive," meaning that they create loopholes or that they ignore whole areas tied to the issue. Compounding the situation is widespread ignorance--surprisingly even among doctors, nurses and other health-care professionals--about these laws and what they mean.
"Very often, those in charge aren't completely aware of the policy," says Glick. "So if a patient wants to exercise the right to withdraw treatment, these professionals often don't know what to tell them or what to do."
Glick's findings illustrate the haphazard way right-to-die legislation is created throughout the country. He found that, by and large and especially in Florida, the lack of adequate legislation has prompted state courts to step in and create precedent, urging legislatures to clear up their stand on the issue.
Criticism of right-to-die legislation typically springs from ethical considerations that has the core of the issue bound by a familiar moral dilemma: can "life" effectively end even though there's still a pulse? If so, when should whatever remains be terminated? And by whom? It's this so-called "playing God" aspect of the issue that fuels most of the movement's opposition.
"Up until now the medical profession has been about healing people," says Tom Horkan, executive director of the Florida Catholic Conference, the leading group opposed to right- to-die legislation in the state. "If it starts being about killing people, it's going to be a very dangerous thing."
Such sentiment is why progress toward setting any statewide policy typically has been bought by at times fierce confrontations between supporters of more liberal legislation and between religious and other interest groups. The result has been costly court fights and debilitating slogs through legislative quagmires--typically in the glare of media attention. Laws that finally are hammered out often can be interpreted so many different ways that many cases end up right back in the courts. Not surprisingly, Glick found that most laws governing the right to die don't address all the circumstances people with dire medical problems are likely to face. People like Estelle Browning keep slipping through the legal cracks.
The lack of comprehensive right-to-die laws may be the result of a public paradox. Despite opinion polls showing the vast majority of Americans favoring such laws, when given legal options for directing how their deaths may be arranged according to their wishes--such as through living wills--most people choose to do nothing, says Glick.
"It's clear that the majority of people want to be able to avoid being kept alive by heroic measures. Almost no one wants a technologically prolonged death. But most people don't translate their ideas into action. They just hold opinions."
Shaping popular opinion on the right to die--and helping bring the issue to a head in this country--is the fact that more life-sustaining medical technology is available today than at any time in history. Studies show that soon there will be many more of us around to use such high-tech medicine than ever before--not only are Americans living longer, but the number of the nation's 'oldest old' is expected to jump dramatically during the next few decades.
Glick's study contrasts such warning signs against the political, social and economic realities that continue to muddy the issue. Aside from the ever-present moral debate on what "life" means, and when it ends or should end, getting serious on right-to-die legislation has ramifications policy-makers only now are beginning to realize.
Any measure affecting the way older, terminally ill or hopelessly comatose patients are treated could have enormous economic consequences for a national health system that of late has drawn increasing criticism for being fiscally--if not ethically-- out of whack. In a time when fewer than 30 percent of Americans can afford comprehensive health insurance, life support is often outrageously expensive, clocking in at upwards of $10,000 a day in some cases. On the eve of the unveiling of the Clinton administration's proposals for health-care reform, there is talk in Washington for living wills, for example, to be used to limit medical coverage.
Right-to-die policies touch so many sensitive nerves that they pose a political quandary of potentially epic proportions, Glick says. He likens the situation--characterized by growing national uneasiness amid a din of ethical, legal and social debate- -to the ferment over abortion that led to Roe v. Wade in 1973.
"Right-to-life advocates see most of these proposals, whether they are withdrawing treatment, euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide, as essentially murder. They say you should not interfere in any way shape or form with life," he said. "The anti-abortion people have taken up the right to die as a parallel issue. These proposals, in their view, are a way of hastening death."
Wherever the current debate takes the nation's consciousness on the issue, Florida's contributions are apt to figure prominently. Glick's chronicle of the state's struggle to deal with the subject provides a detailed look at a facet of social history-in-the-making that Florida can rightly claim all its own.
As the friends of Estelle Browning would discover, as late as 1989 interpretations of Florida's right-to-die laws were still murky at best. Bill Bell, general counsel for the Florida Hospital Association, the first prominent mainline Florida interest group to support living-will legislation, recalls a time before the Florida Life-Prolonging Procedures Act became the state's law of the land on the issue just last year.
"At one point we had state statutes saying one thing and using a particular terminology; we had a supreme court decision that went a bit further and used different terminology; and we had some nursing home rules that went in another direction," Bell told Research in Review. "We could spend all day trying to determine what took precedent, and in the meantime the care- givers didn't know what they could and couldn't do."
Public awareness about the right to die in Florida reached a highpoint in 1967, when Walter Sackett, a retired Miami doctor, made the issue his personal crusade after winning a seat in the Florida House of Representatives. In his profile of Sackett's work in The Right to Die, Glick credits this novice legislator with being the first to put the topic on a legislative agenda anywhere in the U.S. Sackett put forth the state's first living will legislation, arguing that terminally ill patients and their families should be spared unwanted and futile medical treatment. Not content with that, Sackett went a step further and advocated euthanasia for indigent retarded patients who were wards of the state.
It was that extra step that doomed any chance for passage of right-to-die laws in Florida for the next several years. Despite gaining a national forum for his views (he appeared on 60 Minutes and the Phil Donahue and the Dick Cavett talk shows), Sackett watched his bills fail repeatedly. His proposals ignited advocates for the disabled and retarded, who mounted a ferocious fight against him. The battles were largely unnecessary, Glick writes, since Sackett's bills were immediately killed in committee anyway. Branded a dangerous extremist, Sackett suddenly found it very difficult to get anything done in the Legislature. The issue cost him a bid for reelection in 1976.
"Walter Sackett received no support whatever, and was roundly criticized by some very well-established groups," says Glick. "Frankly, had he not put up (his proposal on retarded patients), he might have gotten somewhere on the right to die."
Sackett's legacy also bolsters opponents' arguments over what could happen should such laws fall into the wrong hands. Of late, a lot of people might describe "the wrong hands" as Michigan's Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the inventor of the "Mercitron" carbon monoxide suicide machine (see sidebar). Kevorkian has made a reputation for helping a number of chronically ill patients kill themselves, a practice that has earned him suspension of his state medical license and prompted the Michigan legislature last March to enact a law specifically designed to stop him. "Dr. Death"--one of his monikers in the popular press--spent the first part of 1993 helping patients commit suicide while racing against time to beat the new state law.
Glick hopes the media blitz surrounding Kevorkian may move people to make their own intentions known by completing living wills or by requesting such options as durable power of attorney. These simple measures are seen as the key elements in implementing practical right-to-die laws. Living wills, for example, can outline specific limits on treatment patients will accept should they at some stage become incapable of making those decisions themselves. Several organizations, including the New York-based group Choice in Dying, distribute free living-will forms tailored to the laws in each state. They're legally binding in all states.
But again, Glick has found that few people are bothering with them. A recent study he conducted with Dr. Marie Cowart of FSU's Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy shows just how uncomfortable people still are with the idea of death. Despite the fact that living wills and the right to die are in the news more now than ever, and that hospital and nursing-home personnel are now required by law to inform incoming patients of their right to draw up such wills, often only one percent of patients choose to do it.
"They almost never do," Glick says. "We found that when you're going into the hospital for a procedure, it's just too stressful; you don't want to think about advance directives."
But give people the chance to deal with the problem before they get sick and they jump at it. When the Florida Medical Association teamed with the Florida Bar Association recently in a statewide campaign designed to give people access to living will and durable power of attorney forms through an 800 number, they hoped to get about 10,000 calls. They got 35,000.
Meanwhile, as public sentiment remains confused over the issue, Glick predicts state courts and legislatures will continue to thrash out the dos and don'ts of the right to die. In all likelihood, too, the federal Supreme Court will continue handing down piecemeal rulings such as it did in 1990 in the famous case of Nancy Cruzan.
This bizarre legal leapfrog--which brought advocates to a froth on both sides of the debate--nevertheless produced the first federal ruling on the right to withdraw treatment. Cruzan, a 30- year old Missouri woman in an irreversible vegetative state since a 1983 car accident, hadn't executed a living will but had told friends and family that she wouldn't have wanted to be kept alive in such a condition. When the Missouri state supreme court refused to allow Nancy's feedings to be discontinued, the Cruzans appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court (Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health) and lost. Later, the state reversed itself and in 1990, Nancy's feeding tubes were disconnected, and she died.
Glick says the case, while hardly putting a clear perspective on an issue that some observers feel is potentially far more legally complex than the abortion issue, nevertheless represents the closest thing to a national--albeit conservative-- right-to-die law of the land. The ruling sets a Roe v. Wade-type precedent for other states to follow, if indeed they choose to, he said.
"A Supreme Court ruling may take the issue off the agenda temporarily, but that doesn't last very long, especially with cases where there are so many moral questions such as abortion and the right to die. (As we've seen with abortion) such decisions are continually being challenged because they're written in such a way that they're open to interpretation. People quickly find that they don't cover everything."
With a nod in the Supreme Court's direction, most states will move toward adopting either more liberal or more conservative right-to-die measures depending almost entirely on the prevailing political climates in their backyards, says Glick. But even though health-care issues are generally handled this way in the U.S., it figures that this fight, with its convoluted moral and money side effects, could be the next big one for the feds.
Damned if They Do:
Doctors and Patient Suicide
Today, when most Americans think of the right to die, they picture the wizened mug of Jack "the Reaper" Kevorkian staring out at them from CNN or the cover of Time. But physicians have helped their terminally ill patients to die with little fanfare for hundreds of years all over the world, and they'll continue to after Kevorkian has faded from the spotlight.
The now-infamous Kevorkian is credited with giving anti-euthanasia advocates the extra muscle they need to turn popular sentiment against euthanasia laws. Many wryly credit him with the defeat of Initiative 119, a Washington state measure that would have legalized physician-assisted suicide. Initiative 119 was heavily favored initially, then defeated this past November just after Kevorkian helped two chronically but not terminally ill patients kill themselves.
Right or wrong, coverage of Kevorkian "stimulates further interest in the issue and makes people more likely to develop opinions about it," says FSU Political Science Chair Henry R. Glick, author of the new book The Right to Die. " It puts it on the agenda."
It's also stimulated other people in the medical profession to write about the right to die and the need for comprehensive legislation in all the states. Doctors who have accepted and in some cases practiced the unwritten policy of mercy killing for their terminally ill patients have begun in recent years to talk about instances in which they've participated in assisted suicide.
Dr. Timothy Quill is one such doctor. A family practitioner in Rochester, New York, Quill prescribed barbiturates to a leukemia patient, knowing she would use them to kill herself. He then wrote about it the experience the New England Journal of Medicine, believing it important to begin a discourse with other doctors on their duty to assist terminally ill patients in ending their lives.
Studies have shown that a large percentage of U.S. physicians recognize this need and generally support it, even if they would refuse to participate in such an act themselves. A California study of 600 physicians found that 62 percent approved of doctors helping their terminally ill patients to die, and 23 percent had helped at least one person commit suicide. The American Medical Association's council of ethical and judicial affairs ruled in 1991 that doctors must respect their patients' wishes concerning the withdrawal of life support, but it draws the line at physician-assisted suicide. As a result, the United States among the more conservative of countries who take a stance on this issue.
The most striking instance of liberalism with regard to physician-assisted suicide comes from the Netherlands, where the act is still on the books as a crime punishable by up to 12 years in prison. But according to an article in the Feb. 14, 1993 New York Times, the Dutch Parliament has agreed that doctors performing this service will not be prosecuted. That the Netherlands has granted its doctors such blanket legal protection stands in marked contrast to present policy in the U.S., which deals mainly with living wills and withdrawal of treatment. It has yet to take on anything so foreboding as doctors who help their patients commit suicide.
As it stands, physician-assisted death is severely restricted in 26 U.S. states including Florida. The Florida Life-Prolonging Procedures Act, for instance, prohibits mercy killing and euthanasia. So while a doctor may respond to a request from a patient for even tacit assistance in ending life, he might also keep quiet about it--so quiet that it's hard to estimate how much it actually takes place.
T. Patrick Hill of Choice in Dying, a New York City-based organization that advocates for the rights of patients to refuse unwanted medical treatment, says the issue is fraught with uncertainty. Though several doctors have been tried for assisting in suicides, he says, "the history of successful prosecution is virtually nil." While there might be support for some cases of physician-assisted suicide among an individual's family or among those participating in several polls on the issue conducted within the last year, that doesn't necessarily translate into legislative reform.
"When you look at the issue, you see that our approach to it as a society is more sophisticated than people will admit to," Hill said. "Any resolution will be a messy one because the problem is a messy one."
The question is a bit more cut-and-dried for Tom Horkan, executive director of the Florida Catholic Conference, an organization that opposes physician-assisted suicide by Jack Kevorkian or anyone else.
"We still hang in there with the 10 commandments, one of which says, 'thou shall not kill.' It doesn't say thou shall not kill unless you're a licensed physician; it doesn't say thou shall not kill unless you feel good about it. It says thou shall not kill, period," Horkan said. "If we could go back to the old days when doctors practiced medicine and didn't involve themselves with practicing anything else, people would be a lot better off."
http://mailer.fsu.edu/~research/RinR/Final.html
It's insanity, I heard about the Ross case the other day. That is plain crazy.
Whenever you look at Terri's situation it should be plain as day. It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out.
Florida Legislators have got to straighten out the problems in our statutes. Denying to give nutrition and hydration is by definition euthanasia by omission. SO IMO Jim King's legacy is a law that is unconstitutional because it's contradictory and violation of the Florida law that says euthanasia is illegal.
We can't let the USA legitimize the attack on life that the Netherlands has! We have to keep up the fight against it!-
Failing to give nutrition and hydration might be euthanasia by omission, but actively working to ensure they are not given is active euthanasia.
And that is what Judge Greer is guilty of when he said in so many words, I don't want anyone trying to feed that woman!
I'm on hold right now at 202-324-300. All the lines are busy and someone will take my call soon as possible.
Bumping post 1,564
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