He states:
Not so. Judge George Greer examined the testimony. He's the only one who did. Appellate courts do not re-visit the "findings of fact." Findings of fact are assumed to be correct. Judge Greer turned two boxes of conflicting testimony into two irreversable "facts": that Terri Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state, and that her wish would be to die in such a circumstance. Another judge examining the same conflicting testimony may well have reached an opposite conclusion on one or both of those matters. Greer himself is not competent to diagnose PVS; it came down to which set of doctors he chose to believe. It was essentially an arbitrary decision on his part, never to be reviewed again by anyone. That is precisely why the Congress wanted a de novo review of the facts. Terri Schiavo had not been examined or tested in years, and yet the courts were about to mandate her death without an MRI or a PET scan ever having been done. But Mr. Fein tells us that in doing so...
Nonsense. Under Article III, Congress could have constituted the Court of Terri Schiavo if it wanted to. It has already constituted special courts for tax matters and some other things. For convenience and speed, it chose to delegate the jurisdiction to the existing courts in the 11th circuit. As for the requirement for a de novo review...
In this case, "the effect thereof" was to be "it doesn't matter what they did." Too bad the Schindlers' lawyers never figured that out, and in a massive fest of incompetence and stupidity, blew the chance Congress had given Terri. |
This article is crap. Mr. Fein is wrong on several counts.