Posted on 05/28/2007 9:33:12 AM PDT by wagglebee
The Christian attorney who fought to keep Terry Schiavo alive says the three leading GOP presidential candidates don't understand the important disability issues involved in the widely publicized 2005 case.
During a recent Republican presidential debate in California, the candidates were asked whether Congress was right to intervene in the Terry Schiavo case by attempting to prevent the state of Florida from removing the disabled woman's feeding tube. The answers varied.
Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, said he thought it "was a mistake" for Congress to get involved and the matter should have been left at the state level. Senator John McCain said Congress "probably acted too hastily." And former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani called the case a "family dispute."
David Gibbs III of the Christian Law Association says the United States gives greater due process to convicted murderers than to innocent disabled people. The former attorney for Schiavo's parents argues that Congress did the right thing when it intervened to provide her those rights.
"Many of the candidates are following the political wind, if you will, instead of showing leadership and saying, 'You know what? That was good public policy back then. We need to stand up for the disabled. We need to stand up for the senior citizens,'" Gibbs says. "We need to have that compassion for vulnerable people as opposed to taking the mindset that those people that just don't matter," he notes.
It is disingenuous, the Christian attorney contends, for candidates to claim they are pro-life but not be willing to grant due process rights to the disabled. "If you're pro-life, you have to be pro-life at every step," he says.
"Please understand: our founding fathers understood that you don't have any liberty, our Constitution doesn't matter, if you don't protect the innocent life of the citizens," Gibbs explains. "That's why they talked about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- your free speech, your freedom of religion, your right to own a gun or [receive] due process of law," he says. "If the government can kill you, you have no true liberty."
When Rudy Giuliani visited Florida he initially said he was in favor of assisting Terry Schiavo but later backpedaled from those comments, Gibbs points out. And in the recent GOP presidential debate, he says, only Kansas Senator Sam Brownback and Congressman Duncan Hunter of California got the issue right when they were asked about the Schiavo case.
> Only someone who isn't interested in evidence, but is determined to believe without evidence would say that.
Rubbish. All the physics in the world isn't going to prove your negative. All you get is one false theory after another -- and none of those are evidence at all. The FACT of the case is the body on the floor. That is what cries out for an explanation in human terms. That's why people want the story.
~~~~~
"In the past, I have taken care of comatose patients, including those in a persistent vegetative state. While it is true that those patients will flinch or make sounds occasionally, they don’t do it as a reaction to someone on a constant basis who is taking care of them, the way I saw Terri do.
"I witnessed a priest visiting Terri a couple of times. Terri would become quiet when he prayed with her. She couldn’t bow her head because of her stiff neck, but she would still try. During the prayer, she would keep her eyes closed, opening them afterward. She laughed at jokes he told her. I definitely know that Terri 'is in there.'"
~~~~~
"I rolled her over and she was lifeless. And it almost seems like she had this last breath. So I held her in my arms, and I'm trying to shake her up. I ran over, I called 911. Her brother happened to live in the same complex as we did. I called him. I went back to Terri. And from there, six, seven minutes later, the paramedics..."
1. He says he rolled her over (but she was found face down by Bobby and by the paramedics [police report]). If he rolled her back over, face down, when she was unconscious or struggling for breath, it would demonstrate his guilt.
2. He says he then held her in his arms. Really? She was in the bathroom doorway. How did he fit? Try cradling somebody while you fit your 6'-6" frame sideways in a doorway.
3. Then, "I'm trying to shake her up..." I'll bet we can believe this one. Violent shaking causes neck injuries.
~~~ 4. "I rolled her over and she was lifeless. And it almost seems like she had this last breath."
I wonder if this isn't a perfect picture -- right after he got off her back. He realized he asphyxiated her.
Why should I? He's already made a fool of himself. Are you claiming that he is a Nobel prize nominee, that his advertising of that on his letterhead, website, and other places was true?
< >> That Terri Schiavo had a spinal cord or vertebral injury, when no other doctor who examined her agreed, and in fact the autopsy clearly found there was no such injury.
--- Ah, you call a clinical finding a "lie"!
You're not reading my posts very well; we've discussed this in several posts. I never called the clinical finding of muscle rigidity a lie. Terri Schiavo had muscle rigidity, in most of her skeletal muscles. It was found and commented on by many doctors. It is a known result of anoxic brain damage, which Terri Schiavo had. The lie involved was to declare the neck muscle spasticity was evidence of a vertebral injury. Being a neurologist, he knows that anoxic brain damage causes muscle spasticity. If he reviewed the records of Terri Schiavo's case, he also knew there was a negative cervical spine x-ray from the ER. He also could find the bone scan report, with no nuclide accumulation in the C-spine. Lie or incompetent, take your pick.
So is it a lie every time a doctor makes a clinical finding or only when you call some other doctor's finding a mistake? You called Dr. Walker's findings a mistake, why didn't you call him a liar too?
Since I never called anyone a liar for a clinical finding, the question is moot. Dr. Walker's findings were not a mistake, and I never called them that. (False accusations, again.) Dr. Walker's findings were the nuclide accumulations, which no one disputes. His comments on the possible cause were (he admitted) influenced by the history given him. The history was inaccurate.
Dr. Bambakidis also testified that in Terri Schiavo's case, the stiff neck was from anoxic brain damage. I posted that testimony, as you may recall, so you knew better.
There is no dispute, though, that Terri had that terribly stiff neck from day one and the rest of her life. There is good medical reason to suspect it was caused by trauma, isn't there?
Actually, no. She had no signs of trauma in the ER or that developed over the next several days. She had a negative C-spine X-ray, and even a negative bone scan for C-spine injury. She had known anoxic brain damage which causes muscle rigidity. So what is that "good medical reason"?
Read some medicine before you make statements like this. High speed decelerations injuries take a large amount of Kinetic energy. Kinetic injury is 1/2 mass x velocity squared, so velocity is the key factor since it is squared. The energy from car accidents involves huge mass (the car) and velocity that is measured in miles per hour. How does someone jumping on another person give that kind of mass and velocity? Answer: it doesn’t. And of course, if someone jumped on Terri Schiavo, where are the bruises that would result?
. A compression fracture is axial loaded? So the victim, in her struggles, put her foot against something solid and pushed so hard that she hurt her back.
Ridiculous. You could strain a muscle that way, but no way is that sufficient force to cause a compression fracture in healthy bone. If you maintain that it is, please post authoritative medical data to prove it.
"High energy deceleration injuries" sure don't sound like heterotrophic ossification, do they? They doesn't sound like the Seldane she wasn't taking either.
Which is the whole point - if Terri Schiavo did not have a high energy deceleration injury, then the hot spots on scan weren't traumatic. They had some non-traumatic cause.
This is a waste of bandwidth, doc. You can't prove the negative. All you prove is where you're coming from.
On the contrary, the biomechanics of bone injury have been studied. They prove those bone injuries can’t come from your scenario. You prove where you’re coming from by ignoring the medicine when it doesn’t say what you want.
A bit more data for you: This article gives the average kinetic energy needed to produce spinal fractures. According to the correlating x-rays, Terri Schiavo had an L1 endplate fracture. If it was produced in healthy bone (as opposed to osteoporotic bone after she was immobilized) the article states
The average kinetic energy and force necessary to produce endplate, wedge, and burst fractures were 57, 84, 104 Nm, and 4.8, 6.5, 6.3 kN, respectively.So we need 57 Nm and 4.8 kN for an endplate fracture. A kN is a kilonewton, or 224.8 pounds. So we need 224.8 pounds x 4.8 = 1079 lbs. A Nm is a Newton meter or 224.8 pounds acting through the distance of 1 meter. So that’s 224.8 pounds acting through a distance of 57 meters. Or a higher weight and shorter distance, or vice versa, as long as it comes out to 57. And since it’s a deceleration injury, it means that force had to have a sudden impact. So go ahead and prove that Michael Schiavo could generate that force and kinetic energy without jumping from a height. Also, if he jumped on her, in such a way to fracture her ribs or spine, she would have big time bruises, not to mention the accompanying injuries one might expect, which she didn’t have.
The FACT is that it's known what amount of force it takes to cause a vertebral compression fracture in healthy bone. And you haven't come up with any way for those forces to be generated. You have one theory after another, and they don't fit the medical facts.
He released her to be cremated as fast as the law allowed. The test results were not even in yet. In doing so, he allowed for no second chance, just as he did when he rejected any independent observers at the autopsy itself. I find it odd that he did all of that when he said that in a case "of criminal importance" beforehand
Isn't it customary to release the body to the next of kin after the autopsy is completed?
It wasn't completed. They destroyed the evidence before it was. Too bad, in a "a case of criminal importance" such as this.
Thank you.
The autopsy wasn’t completed? Do you have a link for that?
When were all the tests completed? Sorta hard to re-materialize her ashes for a second opinion I would think if they found a discrepancy. In the meantime, don't ever try find a postive thought about the Schindlers for trying to save their daughter : )
I haven't seen anything that says the autopsy wasn't completed, as you claim. If there is such material, link to it.
In the meantime, don't ever try find a postive thought about the Schindlers for trying to save their daughter : )
You keep trying to make this about the emotion. That's lots of sadness in this, but that's not the part I'm interested in - I've seen plenty of sadness for plenty of patients and families, including my own. You have no idea what I think or don't, so stop playing mind reader. As I've said many times, I'm interested in discussing the medicine, and correcting the distortions of the medical information.
With people like you around, you can never be to cautious.
.
"A poignant moment in the attorney's presentation came when he showed a slide of the exhumed body of Medgar Evers, perfectly composed after being buried more than 25 years at Arlington National Cemetery.
"Several members of the audience shed tears, as the speaker seemed to choke back his own emotions."
"The exhumation, with permission from the Evers' family, allowed a forensic pathologist's autopsy to establish a cause of death, according to the attorney. It also provided Van Evers, the youngest of the three Evers' children, the opportunity to see his father for the first time in his memory."
Sure, the Nazis did the same thing. Take the emotions out of it and make intellectual. I guess you are intellectual?
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