Thomas Sowell: 'Cruel and unusual' punishment for being an inconvenience

If the tragic case of Terri Schiavo shows nothing else, it shows how easily "the right to die" can become the right to kill. It is hard to believe that anyone, regardless of their position on euthanasia, would have chosen the agony of starvation and dehydration as the way to end someone's life.

A New York Times headline on March 20th tried to assure us: "Experts Say Ending Feeding Can Lead to a Gentle Death" but you can find experts to say anything. In a December 2, 2002 story in the same New York Times, people starving in India were reported as dying, "often clutching pained stomachs."

No murderer would be allowed to be killed this way, which would almost certainly be declared "cruel and unusual punishment," in violation of the Constitution, by virtually any court.

Terri Schiavo's only crime is that she has become an inconvenience — and is caught in the merciless machinery of the law. Those who think law is the answer to our problems need to face the reality that law is a crude and blunt instrument.

Make no mistake about it, Terri Schiavo is being killed. She is not being "allowed to die."

She is not like someone whose breathing, blood circulation, kidney function, or other vital work of the body is being performed by machines. What she is getting by machine is what all of us get otherwise every day — food and water. Depriving any of us of food and water would kill us just as surely, and just as agonizingly, as it is killing Terri Schiavo.

Would I want to be kept alive in Terri Schiavo's condition? No. Would I want to be killed so slowly and painfully? No. Would anyone? I doubt it.

Every member of Terri Schiavo's family wants her kept alive — except the one person who has a vested interest in her death, her husband. Her death will allow him to marry the woman he has been living with, and having children by, for years.

Legally, he is Terri's guardian and that legal technicality is all that gives him the right to starve her to death. Courts cannot remove guardians without serious reasons. But neither should they refuse to remove guardians with a clear conflict of interest.

There are no good solutions to this wrenching situation. It is the tragedy of the human condition in its most stark form.

The extraordinary session of Congress, calling members back from around the country, with the President flying back from his home in Texas in order to be ready to sign legislation dealing with Terri Schiavo, are things that do us credit as a nation.

Even if critics who claim that this is being done for political or ideological reasons are partially or even wholly correct, they still miss the point. It is the public's sense of concern — in some cases, outrage — that is reflected by their elected representatives.

What can Congress do — and what effect will it have? We do not know and Congress does not know. Those who are pushing for legislation to save Terri Schiavo are obviously trying to avoid setting a precedent or upsetting the Constitutional balance.

It is an old truism that hard cases make bad law. No one wants all such cases to end up in either Congress or the federal courts. But neither do decent people want an innocent woman killed because she was inconvenient and a court refused to recognize the conflict of interests in her legal guardian.

The fervor of those who want to save Terri Schiavo's life is understandable and should be respected, even by those who disagree. What is harder to understand is the fervor and even venom of those liberals who have gone ballistic — ostensibly over state's rights, over the Constitutional separation of powers, and even over the sanctity of family decisions.

These are not things that liberals have any track record of caring about. Is what really bothers them the idea of the sanctity of life and what that implies for their abortion issue? Or do they hate any challenge to the supremacy of judges — on which the whole liberal agenda depends — a supremacy that the Constitution never gave the judiciary?

If nothing else comes out of all this, there needs to be a national discussion of some humane way to end life in those cases when it has to be ended — and this may not be one of those cases.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.

Tough question. I have been following this case on the fringes for awhile. I came to it with the initial feeling that the parents really need to let go. I am a parent myself and I had to stop and think about it and read and think and so on. As I dug into it more, I could see why the parents were having a difficult time with this (to say the least) and why they were resisting. I still see that. This case has been beneficial to me personally before the govt involvement because it made me recheck my documents, talk to my spouse, my kids, etc. That is always a good thing. Has it been 'beneficial' to Terri to have this pulled into such a public arena. I don't know that answer. It's really about her after all. If she is truly unaware, then I guess it makes no difference. If she is truly wishing to die, she is probably not happy about it and if she is truly wishing to live, she is probably hopeful. Who can say? I imagine the husband (nor the parents)didn't count on this sort of attention to the situation. God knows how they all handle it. It's painful to watch but that doesn't mean the discussion are bad. I am disappointed in the lack of compassion expressed by those participating in the legal discussions and the lack of expression of mercy in the legal decisions. I think there are a few of us in the public that have an even greater dislike for the judicial types in general after having seen the faceless, humanless decisions reported in this case so far. I don't have an answer to your question, not a clean one anyway.

A lot of conservatives and idependent thinkers not necessarily identified with the "religous right" have come out for Terri.

One of the ones who surprised me most was James Q. Wilson. You have to scroll down to his column "Killing Terri" which appeared in Monday's WSJ.

I think you are correct and I am concerned about the now popular theme of everybody should have a living will. I see such pre ordered instructions as an invitation for a variety of interpretations which may be at variance with the intention of the patient-to-be. We do not know who may be in our lives at the time of execution of a living will, and whether they would act in our best interests or their own. I think at this point we can expect to be helped to a quicker death by this society should we ever have the misfortune to lose our capacity to take care of ourselves, at whatever age. I also do not trust body parts harvesting for the same reasons.

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