Schiavo lawyer says legal system abandoned principles
Six months after the controversial death of Terri Schiavo, the lead attorney who fought to keep her alive says the Florida woman suffered a "barbaric" death at the hands of a legal system that had abandoned the ideals of the nation's Founding Fathers.
David Gibbs III, who was hired by Schiavo's parents to fight a court order to remove a feeding tube from their brain-damaged daughter, said her death violated the American promise to protect Schiavo's inalienable rights, as declared by the authors of the Declaration of Independence. "How did we, under our constitution - with Founding Fathers who said we will defend 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' - how did we let her die in this barbaric death?" Gibbs asked during a news conference Tuesday in Evansville.
He spent the rest of the evening examining the question at a dinner sponsored by a local organization called "Restoring Our Heritage." Gibbs, a lawyer with the Christian Legal Association, spoke to several hundred people who paid $30 a person to attend the event. Gibbs believes Schiavo's death was an example of how the American legal system has distanced itself from the "Christian principles" which he and Restoring Our Heritage members believe guided the Founding Fathers. He said Schiavo's death from dehydration on March 31 - after 13 days with no food or fluids - was evidence that the legal system had abandoned America's commitment to "defend the weak, the voiceless, the defenseless." "We as a nation must re-evaluate our compassion and our commitment to the disabled," Gibbs said. "Do we believe that every person - regardless of physical condition - has a right to life? Or are they like old cell phones that we just discard when they're no longer useful? Are we just going to throw people away?"
Her case became the focus of a national "right to die"controversy that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Gibbs became involved in the case in 2003 at the request of Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler. They'd spent nearly a decade fighting in various courts to keep their daughter on a feeding tube, while their son-in-law - Michael Schiavo - argued his wife was in an irreversible vegetative state and had a right to die. The medical examiner who performed the autopsy after her death concluded Schiavo had massive and irreversible brain damage and was blind. But Gibbs said he witnessed the life in Terri Schiavo and disagreed with the medical examiner's report.
"I was in the room with Terri," said Gibbs. "I saw how alive she was. I watched her die with her mother and father literally begging for her life." Gibbs said he was angered that she had so few rights left at the end of her life. "It's a crime to starve an animal to death ..." said Gibbs. "If Terri Schiavo had been a convicted mass murderer, our constitution would have prohibited you from starving her to death. If she had been a prisoner of war, the Geneva Convention and other international laws would have protected her."
But, he said, she fell into kind of legal black hole. "She wasn't an animal, she was a woman. She wasn't a convicted mass murderer, she was an innocent woman. She wasn't a prisoner of war, she was a U.S. citizen," said Gibbs. About 40 judges in six courts were involved in the Schiavo case over a decade's time. Six times, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene. After the final removal of her feeding tube, Congress rushed through a bill to allow the federal courts to take up the case, and President Bush signed it March 21, but the federal courts refused to step in.
On Nov. 15, Terri Schiavo's brother, Bobby Schindler, will speak at The Victory in Downtown Evansville at an event sponsored by the Vanderburgh County Right to Life.