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People who see conservatives or the “religious right” behind any interference with the “necessary and appropriate” death of Terri Schiavo hang their hat on that label: husband.

Nope, I hang my hat on the fact that, right or wrong, the trier of fact appointed him guardian.

Our legal system works pretty well, most of the time for most people.
No system made by man can be perfect, and sometimes the innocent are hurt, but that is part of the price of having the best legal system ever designed.
At some point, there has to be finality of judgment or a legal system is just a joke, incapable of deciding anything.

Terri Schiavo seems to have gotten crushed in the gears, but it is not the fault of the judicial system, or any overreaching by judges. It is the fault of a badly written custody law, similar to those in most states.

A judicial activist judge would have reached right beyond the norms of the law and granted custody to her parents, and been just as wrong as any other judge stretching the law to suit his feelings.

SO9

I am not faulting merely the courts in this matter. I am also faulting the Schindlers' attorneys. THEY should have asked for separate counsel for Terri a decade ago. That that counsel could have filed for divorce in her name.

It remains that Judge Greer is an arrogant SOB for not reopening the evidence and ordering definitive brain function tests that are routine today but were not available ten years ago.

Billybob

"Nope, I hang my hat on the fact that, right or wrong, the trier of fact appointed him guardian."

So, if some future "trier of fact" decides that left-handed people are defective and orders all left-handed people starved to death, that'll be just hunky-dory with you?

And then when he starts "finding" that the right-handed enemies of his campaign donors are actually left-handed, you won't have a problem with that?

"that is part of the price of having the best legal system ever designed"

We don't have it any more, as this atrocity demonstrates very well.

I don't see it that way, probably because I don't know what the law says. But what the law shoud say is that the judge will assure that what is done, is done in the best interests of the subject (teri). once the circumstances of michael's common law wife were ascertained, the judge should have immediately withdrawn custody from michael and given it the parents due to the obvious probability of a conflict of interest. There is no such evidence of any probability of conflict of interest for the parents being guardians. If the law is contrary to that then the law needs to be changed.