Posted on 03/29/2005 10:29:34 AM PST by dead
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 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.
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 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 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 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."
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.
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 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.
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.
You're onto something. HIV and AIDs sufferers had better sit up and take note.
If not then why is this case different?
If my heart can't work for me then let me go.
Her heart was working just fine. All she needed was food and water.
That is all you need too.
In my opinion, leftist liberals that advocate for saving Terri Schiavo are nothing more than cowardly opportunists who are beginning to see the long-term (and hopefully irreversible) damage the recent litany of ghoulish Democrat excesses are having on their camp of killers with the average man and woman. They've been saddled with the worst elements of our post-modern culture of death, including pro-abortion, pro-homosexual (AIDS), pro-euthanasia, pro-human cloning, anti-religious, anti-property rights, anti-American, indeed, anti-anything that derives from a sense of true human compassion and respect for life and liberty. And this includes those who, after advancing the worst excesses of the loony left for so many generations, now appear to be on the sane and rational side. And I mean people like the Hildabeast, Jackson, and Frank (of all people). I wouldn't trust these "conversions" to be sincere any more than I'd trust a snake in the grass!
Nat Hentoff is one of the few liberals that I respect. He's like a sober Christopher Hitchens
You haven't paid attention. Hentoff, who is a fixture at the Village Voice is just about the only (and by far the most notable and loudest) anti-abortion voice on the left.
And after this sorry affair, he will be one of the few leftists who will still be able to credibly claim to speak on behalf of the downtrodden and those who have no voice (the only basis on which the left traditionally claimed moral superiority--since statism per se is amoral).
Maybe she did, but we have no way of knowing. We have the word of her parents and others in her family (the one she grew up in) saying that she would want to live, and the word of her adulterous husband saying she'd want to die. I know which one I'd be more likely to trust. And in any case, if there's doubt, then the assumption should always be that she'd want to live, unless someone can seriously make the case that she's suffering where she is now. I don't know if anyone's tried to make that case.
Her heart's been working fine, by the way. There was never any need to artificially pump blood through her. Same goes for her lungs.
Not Hentoff: he's always been solidly pro-life.
You kidding??? The world is really upside down today.
Nat Hentoff, who wrote the article, though a liberal, has been pro-life for decades now. I know, I remember as a young naive liberal being furious with his pro-life position on abortion; as were many Voice readers.
Nat Hentoff has long been a lonely pro-life voice among the hard left.
Nat has been pro-life for 20 years and has taken a lot of flack for it.
I had read quite a few weeks back that her doctor had recommended that they have that removed a long time ago, but it was not done. Why, I don't know, but if it would preclude an MRI or PET scan, it seems to me it could have been removed for that purpose, since it's not doing any good anyway.
susie
Yes, this is worth copying, pasting and circulating. Also worth a letter to the editor of the VOICE praising Hentoff so he can keep this op-ed venue open on the basis of reader demand.
Remember to use your libspeak lexicon: write it in simple Left-Feminese so it will be understood by their readership. An example follows:
(email to editor@villagevoice.com)
Dear Editor,
Nat Hentoff has raised troubling questions about discrimination in the Terri Schiavo case, as news stories have exhibited bias against her equal rights as a disabled woman.
Is the Terri Schiavo case about "quality" of life? It's surely about "equality" of life. It's about disability discrimination, a profit-oriented health care system, and a legal system that does not guarantee the equal protection of the law to people with no independent voice. It is about wives whose very lives are placed at the disposal of patriarchal husbands and haughty "stare decesis" courts.
A shocking number of news stories have exhibited a routine bias against Mrs. Schiavo as a disabled woman.
Her struggle is routinely and thoughtlessly tagged an "end of life"/ "right-to-die" case. Yet Terri Schiavo was an otherwise-healthy 41-year-old woman who was not (before her court-ordered starvation) at the "end" of her life and who had asserted no documentable "right to die."
She's branded "Persistent Vegetative State." Yet MRI and PET scans have never been done, and Terri even when weakened by severe hunger and thirst, struggles to communicate.
It's called a "family dispute." Yet her entire family has begged to be allowed to care for her; only her estranged husband, who repudiated their marriage years before, campaigned for a decade to see her dead.
Probably the most disgusting attitude toward Terri was exhibited by "spiritual"-oriented religious charlatans, who piously opined that she ought to be "allowed" to go "home to Jesus." As if a "life in the great hereafter" could erase the horror of judicial homicide.
Add Pinellas County to your files on Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.
And thank God once more for atheists like Hentoff.
(signed)
And to you freepers, I go by....
Mrs. Don-o
Nat Hentoff has been writing about Terri Schiavo for a couple of years--a quick search of his name on FR produces two articles about her from November 2003. This isn't a fad or some media bandwagon for him.
George Felos, the lawyer for Michael Schiavo, recently told the news media that Terri Shiavo was serene and "resting comfortably." He said this towards the end of her agony engineered by the three men, Michael Schiavo, Judge Greer, and himself. What he did not say was that the only reason she was resting comfortably was because she was being administered morphine intravenously. But of course, it's nothing new for lawyers to misrepresent the facts to suit their purposes. His "resting comfortably", amounts to a "morphine drip" for American society so that we will also rest comfortably with what is going on here.
George Felos is a zealous proponent of euthanasia and it is no coincidence that Michael Schiavo contracted him to help kill Terri—contracted with the bulk of the money from the insurance settlement that was intended to help care for her. Hundreds of thousands of dollars intended for mercy now perversely going to this extremist lawyer. The mainstream media doesn't tell us this—another "morphine drip" so that we may "rest comfortably".
Michael Schiavo, we are told, is a loving husband who merely wants to follow Terri's wishes and mercifully end her long years of suffering. This is another "morphine drip". The main issue here is the real truth of Terri's wishes. There is enough doubt about Michael's actual character, his possible malevolent motivations, his credibility, and the deliberate bias of the first trial, that the US Congress directed the courts to start all over with a new trial at the Federal level. With this much doubt, the courts should always decide in favor of life. We give criminals this benefit of the doubt, why not innocent Terri Schiavo?
Why not? Because the third man in this case is "Genghis" Greer, the federal judge who imperiously gave Congress the back of his hand and ignored their directions. The media tells us that judges are supreme, objective and near infallible in their rulings—another "morphine drip" to help us "rest comfortably" under their benevolent rule. Perhaps Greer become weary of the case and decided to make it go away by his imperial decree. Evidently, he does not care at all about Terri Schiavo or the agony that his barbaric decisions have imposed upon her and her parents for the past 10 plus days. Is he the American version of the Nazi judges prosecuted in the waning days of the Nuremberg Trials? Those judges suppressed evidence, pursued their own twisted personal agendas, disregarded basic humanity, and were complicit in mass murder. "Genghis" Greer seems to be their modern day counterpart.
Meanwhile, the media, like George Felos, keeps us on a "morphine drip" of lies and half-truths. This started in 1973 when the imperial US Supreme court started us on a slippery slope with American Nazi death clinics for sexual convenience. Over 40 million children have been quietly murdered since then. Now we have slid down to euthanasia and the open murder of an innocent woman by a multi-day torture process. What's next on the ghoulish agenda? Who cares? Most Americans continue asleep and "resting comfortably".
Your post is so true. I was heartened when a friend who is so liberal (but I love her anyway!) on the phone asked me about this case, and I was amazed when she sounded almost more passionate than I describing how very wrong this was.
Someone somewhere said that God was holding a mirror up to our souls. Perhaps they were right.
susie
Excellent article. I emailed the Village Voice Editor:
Nat Hentoff's editorial on Terri Schiavo (Terri Schiavo: Judicial Murder) accurately sums up the grim reality of this story. The lack of courage by our elected officials to take action to protect the life of this disabled, voiceless woman exposes them as frauds and empty suits. If they will not protect the least among us who will?
Terri Schiavo has been ordered to be put to death, exterminated, starved and dehydrated. They dare not call it euthanasia, they want us to believe that it is humane and "what Terri would have wanted". Many justify her killing with statements that "I wouldn't want to live that way". By this statement they are then justified in projecting this onto Terri, who never left a written clear directive stating that she would want to be starved and dehydrated.
The talking heads go on all the nightly news shows and tie it up in a nice package, complete with all of the appropriate experts (lawyers, doctors etc...) ready and willing to help us all feel better about murdering Terri Schiavo. Those who oppose it are 'right wing conservatives" or "Christian fanatics" or insert any other undesirable name that helps to make their case. When you don't like the message attack the messenger(s).
Why do they care so much about showing us how to properly view this humane killing? Maybe they hope it will help them sleep better at night.
I was stunned when I read the article. I was unprepared for the grasp of the underlying concerns of the issue from The Village Voice.
It's Nat Hentoff. He is consistently pro-life!
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