Let's see you explain this...
Greer found the testimony offered by Diane Meyer at the trial in 2000, at first credible but then not credible for one reason.
Meyer said that in 1982, she and Terri were recent high school graduates who had just seen a movie about Karen Ann Quinlan, who had been in a coma since collapsing six years earlier. Quinlan was the subject of a bitter court battle over her parents’ decision to take her off a respirator.
Meyer says she told a cruel joke about Quinlan, and it set Terri off.
“She went down my throat about this joke, that it was inappropriate.” She remembers Terri saying she wondered how the doctors and lawyers could possibly know what Quinlan was really feeling or what she would want. Terri added, “Where there’s life, there’s hope.”
Greer said that Quinlan died in the ’70s. He concluded that Meyer was mistaken about the date of her discussion with Schiavo and speculated that it occurred when the two were children, not young adults. Greer said, “The court is mystified as to how these present tense verbs would have been used some six years after the death of Karen Ann Quinlan.” He ordered Terri’s feeding tube to be capped.
Point of fact—Quinlan died in 1985, a fact that Greer could easily have established and taken judicial notice of. Greer then discerned Terri’s wishes based on the highly suspect statements of Michael Schiavo and his two relatives.
A former girlfriend of Michael Schiavo, Cindy Shook, gave a deposition on May 8, 2001. Shook said Schiavo got angry when she asked him questions about Terri, saying, “[T]his had destroyed his life and he was being robbed of a normal life.” When Shook asked him about Terri’s care, he said, “How the h-ll should I know, we never spoke about this, my God I was only 25 years old. How the h-ll should I know? We were young. We never spoke of this.”
Based on Shook’s statement, Judge Frank Quesada ordered doctors to uncap Terri’s feeding tube. Greer refused to consider Shook’s statements.
Was Greer just shopping for the right "facts"? Why?
See #308 as to how the Court weighed the girlfriend's testimony.