Posted on 12/04/2003 3:31:09 PM PST by sweetliberty
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Who can be a guardian, 1993 letter from Bob Schindler to Michael Schiavo, Palm beach Post editorial and FReeper response, T'wit's song about Schiavo and Felos, transcript of Lee Webb's (CBN) interview with Kate Adamson, partial timeline of Terri's case, the story of Martin and Anne Shapiro and the report on Terri's birthday party,
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This thread serves as a place for posting all new general information and references, along with links following Terri's case, plus information on cable news and talk radio shows dealing with the issue, court cases and press releases. This is also the place to post contact information, prayers and general discussion.
If you have something that qualifies as BREAKING NEWS or FRONT PAGE NEWS, please post it on a separate thread in that category in order to give it maximum exposure and then post a link to the article/thread here so that it will be included in the next update of links. Also, if you post links to articles from original sources and there is also a thread on FR, please link to the FR thread. Many original links become corrupt over time and we want to be able to access the information at will.
You will notice that this thread is not specifically dated. That is because we are just going to keep this one going until we have need of another one.
A reminder: please do not post personal information on the public forum. We have lots of folks on scene down in Florida and we don't want them having any problems with the death squad.
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As Terri Schiavo turns 40 next week, her loved ones fight for her life
Suspicious Circumstances, the Strange Case of Terri Schiavo
Schiavo asks Pinellas judge to rule without trial
Michael Schiavo tries to block Gov. Bush
Michael Schiavo Again Seeks to Block New Information About Terri
Why Was Terri Denied Holy Communion?
Terri Schiavo's 40th birthday Wednesday
Florida's Bush gets report on Schiavo
Participate in Terri Schiavo's Birthday, December 3, With prayer, Mass Intentions, Cards and Notes
FR Birthday Card: Greetings, Prayers for Terri Schindler-Schiavo
New Guardian Urged for Terri Schiavo, More Evaluation of Her Condition Needed
The Guardian Speaks: Terri Schiavo's guardian files his report; there's bad news and good news.
Terri Schiavo's Family Celebrates Her 40th Birthday, Hundreds Send Cards
Changes Proposed In Right-To-Die Laws - Your help is needed NOW in Florida!
The Case of Terri Schiavo: The Human Rorschach Test
The link for Cheryl's interview, with Ron Panzer, Suzanne Carr (Terri's sister), David Kirkland and call in from Gordon Watts:
Ron Panzer with guests Terri Schindler/Schiavo Conspiracy to Kill Terri
The link for Cheryl's interview, with Ron Panzer, Suzanne Carr (Terri's sister), David Kirkland and call in from Gordon Watts:
Ron Panzer with guests Terri Schindler/Schiavo Conspiracy to Kill Terri
There is a lot happening as a result of this interview! Pray for Terri, and her family, for relief from this horrible nightmare of injustice and judicial tyranny!
I feel that there is a sea change afoot - a transformation in the way this case has been handled. Greer's insane irrationality will be replaced with a return to rational thinking favoring LIFE and self-determination.
Too much B.S. has been swept under the rug for too long - we want answers! People are dying unnaturally in hospices and their loved ones are speaking out against "spousal privileges" that enable murder. Terri Schiavo is only the tip of the iceberg.
LifeNews.com reports:
How Some Hospices are Killing Patients: One Family's Story
by Karla Dial
LifeNews.com Staff Writer
January 2, 2004
[Editor's Note: This article is a follow-up to our well-received exclusive profile of the hospice industry, "Are Euthanasia Advocates Taking Over America's Hospice Industry?" * Names have been changed in this article to protect the identity of people mentioned in it.]
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- The idea of hospices killing patients can evoke a lot of responses -- ranging from wide-eyed incredulity to blatant derision. Hospices don't kill people, some might say; it simply does not happen.
Marilyn Martin* would beg to differ.
Martin's father was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1995. Five years later, his wife put him in a hospice. Within two weeks, he was dead.
"The night he died [the hospice] called me," Martin recalled, "I rushed over in the middle of the night and asked what happened. A nurse said that after we had all left, she gave him some morphine to help his breathing.
"He wasn't having any trouble breathing. So I knew right away they had just overdosed him."
Martin believes her father was killed for money -- specifically, so her mother could inherit some of the millions in his bank account and continue her jet-set lifestyle, unfettered by a debilitated but nonterminal spouse. And she found a hospice that was willing to help her do just that.
Family history
Martin's father got his money the old-fashioned way -- he earned it doing contracting work with the federal government. Shortly after his diagnosis, he retired, but continued working as a consultant, making trips to Asia and South America. For the first few years, he was relatively asymptomatic, untroubled by tremors.
What he did have a problem with was swallowing, and sometimes-garbled speech. And according to Martin, his wife didn't help.
"My mother didn't always stick to the diet," she said. "She'd give him things like peanut butter, which was a definite no-no on the list. So he'd choke on occasions. But there was one very bad incident when he was hospitalized."
That's when the trouble began.
Martin's father had an advance directive stating that he didn't want to be kept on artificial life-support systems if he was ever incapacitated, but that he wanted to be fed; the directive named Martin and her mother as executors. After the choking episode that hospitalized him in 1998, his doctor ordered a round of tests that determined the Parkinson's was progressing, and he'd eventually need a feeding tube.
"My mother was embarrassed," Martin said. "She was constantly traveling [to Europe], out doing her own thing. But it was his choice. They tested my father and said he was perfectly capable of making this decision himself, so there was nothing she could do about it."
Marcia Gideon*, a certified nursing assistant in the Eastern metropolis where the family lived, had been looking after Martin's father two years at that point, while his wife made frequent trips overseas. She accompanied the pair to doctor's appointments, and remembers the feeding tube visit vividly.
"His wife got all crazy about that," she told LifeNews.com. "He couldn't really talk, but you could see by his face that he really wanted the feeding tube. She said he never wanted it and it was in his living will -- but all that was in there was him saying he didn't want artificial life support.
"So she took him to another doctor and said that, and he said, ‘Well, let me ask him.' And he saw that [Mr. Martin] really wanted the feeding tube, so he got it. She was really upset. After that, she would always say she was going in [to see the doctor] with him, and I could wait outside. It was like she didn't want me to know what was going on."
From bad to worse
After that, Gideon said, she and the other two nursing assistants who took turns caring for Martin's father started noticing that his wife was holding a lot of meetings at the house with people she didn't recognize. And within six months, Martin said, her mother said she was going to put her father in a nursing home.
"I got very upset," she said. "There was no reason for him to be put in a nursing home. We had an argument. My mother said it was just something she was thinking about."
Martin was more than willing to have her father move in with her so she could look after him full-time -- and so were his hired caregivers. But the next afternoon, Martin checked her answering machine and heard a frantic message from Gideon.
"She said there was an ambulance coming to pick my father up to take him to a hospice, and if I wanted to do anything about it, I needed to get over there right away," she said.
Gideon was just as upset -- and she finally knew what all the secret meetings had been about.
"One day she came in and said, ‘I'm putting [Mr. Martin] in a hospice home," she recalled. "I said, ‘Hospice? That's where people die! [Mr. Martin's] not dying.' So we called [Marilyn], and she came down. [Mr. Martin] was holding onto her and crying because he knew what they were doing and he didn't want to die. His primary doctor wouldn't do it, but she found some doctor that would put him in a hospice."
Actually, Martin said, it wasn't a doctor at all -- it was a nurse, recognized by one of her father's caretakers, who made the diagnosis that he was fit for hospice care.
"She said a nurse she knew … walked in the house, met my mother, and then they walked out and had their meeting in the car," Martin said. "They knew from the get-go that I was willing to have him live in my house and I'd put a stop to it. That was July 14, 2000."
Things happened very quickly after that.
When her father arrived at the hospice, Martin said, the administrators asked her for a copy of his advance directive, because they didn't have one.
"How do you take a man into your establishment based on the word of some woman who doesn't even have documents?" she asked. "I had them. But he was already there."
So Martin consulted her father's doctors—all three of them.
"My Mom kept switching them," she explained. "When she didn't get the answers she wanted, she moved on. I spoke to all of them, and they said there was nothing in the medical record that indicated he was terminal. The last one said I needed to talk to my mother, because she was ‘manipulating everyone.'
"I told my mother, and she said he couldn't talk to me like that. I said he was my father's doctor, not hers -- so she became one of his patients so he couldn't talk to me anymore."
Meanwhile, Martin and her husband visited her father daily in the hospice. They found him alert, quick to laugh and clown around. But a quick check of the cans of Ensure he relied on for nutrition told her that they weren't feeding him very much -- and by the end of his first week they'd stopped feeding him altogether.
Martin's two brothers arrived from another state at the end of the first week. Just two hours after Martin had left the hospice, they found him "drooling on himself, not the same person at all," she said.
"I caught a nurse shooting something down his throat with a large syringe, and she said it was Roxonol [liquid morphine]," Martin said. Her husband went into the hall and jotted down the names of the medicines on her father's cart; one was Haldol, an antipsychotic that, according to drug monographs, isn't recommended for Parkinson's patients.
"[The Haldol] would explain why my brother saw a drooling man," Martin said. "And if this man isn't terminal or in pain, there's no reason for the morphine."
A few days later, Martin was told her father was dead. It was Aug. 2, 2000 -- less than two weeks since his admission to the hospice.
A tragic end
Convinced it was a hospice murder, Martin started calling anyone who would listen, asking them to investigate: Her local district attorney. The state Department of Aging. The state Office of Quality Healthcare. After getting a police investigator to agree to meet with her, she got a call back from him a few hours later, canceling the appointment. The Office of Quality Healthcare actually did an investigation and told her they'd found "discrepancies" and would be sending her a report. She never got it. Five times, she requested the report under the Freedom of Information Act, and three years later, still hasn't received it. She did, however, receive a phone call from someone in the office telling her she was "stepping on people's toes and had to back off."
"I know my mother wanted this to happen," Martin told LifeNews.com. "She won't discuss it with me. I told her what she did was a felony. She said no one ever told her that giving morphine to someone for no reason was wrong."
Gideon has continued her work as a nursing assistant -- but her view of the hospice industry has been forever changed.
"I don't feel the same way I used to about hospice," she said. "I know they don't all operate in this manner, but there are some that are taking lives and allowing people to die before their time. It's unlawful.
"This man wanted to live. He had grandchildren he enjoyed seeing, and she just took all of that from him. For someone to just wake up and decide one day that he shouldn't live anymore—that's wrong. I want it to stop. I don't want this to keep happening to a lot of other families.
"I don't believe this is the only family this has happened to."
Related web sites:
Hospice Patients Alliance - http://www.hospicepatients.org
We are going to continue the battle until Terri's guardian is her brother or sister, both are young, love Terri and capable of overseeing the kind of rehab Terri needs and deserves. Terri is in a prison cell disguised as a nursing home room. THE DISGUISE ISN'T WORKING. But, unfortunately, it prevents Terri from being whole. Not even a freaking bird show held at the facility she's at now. Terri loves animals.
Terri's been deprived for a long time so she appears "out of it". THAT'S JUST ONE OF THE MAJOR DECEPTIONS.
What evil people are trying to kill this innocent young woman. PURE EVIL!!! Even my midwest relatives talk about the corrupt Pinellas County. The news finally reached Daschle country. I told my aunt by phone how powerful Terri's fight was and once they saw it in their Argus Leader (Sioux Falls), the Great Plains are APPALLED.
MAYBE THEY HEARD OUR CLAIMS OF GENDER BIAS????? I mean we've been very clear that gender bias is part of the discrimination of Terri Schindler-Schiavo.
Posted by Ethan_Allen to Budge; pc93; iowamomforfreedom On News/Activism 10/21/2003 2:12:26 PM EDT #755 of 762
"Judge George Greer may not legally be a Judge in his current capacity "Also, Judge Greer did not qualify to be on the 1998 ballot because he did not "qualify" in the statutorily-prescribed 5 day period. Nor did he file his FS876.05 Oath to the Laws and Constitution according to its nonexistence [based on] the records of where it should have been filed." 239 posted on 10/19/2003 6:22 PM EDT by pc93 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1004420/posts?q=1&&page=51
112.52 Removal of a public official when a method is not otherwise provided.--
(1) When a method for removal from office is not otherwise provided by the State Constitution or by law, the Governor may by executive order suspend from office an elected or appointed public official, by whatever title known, who is indicted or informed against for commission of any felony, or for any misdemeanor arising directly out of his or her official conduct or duties, and may fill the office by appointment for the period of suspension, not to extend beyond the term.
(2) During the period of the suspension, the public official shall not perform any official act, duty, or function or receive any pay, allowance, emolument, or privilege of office.
(3) If convicted, the public official may be removed from office by executive order of the Governor. For the purpose of this section, any person who pleads guilty or nolo contendere or who is found guilty shall be deemed to have been convicted, notwithstanding the suspension of sentence or the withholding of adjudication.
(4) If the public official is acquitted or found not guilty, or the charges are otherwise dismissed, the Governor shall by executive order revoke the suspension; and the public official shall be entitled to full back pay and such other emoluments or allowances to which he or she would have been entitled had he or she not been suspended.
I still don't see why Jeb has not stepped in on his own, yet. Did Judge Greer play any part in the 2000 Presidential election?
Meanwhile, the FL Senators don't know what's been happening in their own state?? This is too bizarre. God please help Terri!
I also found this tidbit which is VERY good.....
#75 of 188
"...... A person may not be appointed a guardian if he or she is in the employ of any person, agency, government, or corporation that provides service to the proposed ward in a professional or business capacity, except that a person so employed may be appointed if he or she is the spouse, adult child, parent, or sibling of the proposed ward or the court determines that the potential conflict of interest is insubstantial and that the appointment would clearly be in the proposed ward's best interest. [ Was Terri ever a patient at the hospital where Michael Schiavo works? If not...] The court may not appoint a guardian in any other circumstance in which a conflict of interest may occur. ______________________________
"The court may not appoint a guardian in any other circumstance in which a conflict of interest may occur. "
That stuff re: Greer is absolutely true. I just read your opening paragraphs. It has been confirmed and yet he continues to serve instead of being behind bars. He owes the taxpayers 500K. Not imo - true, all true.
There is a method in place to remove a judge. Jeb can't suspend Greer.
The Judicial Qualifications Commission is an independent agency created by the Florida Constitution solely to investigate alleged misconduct by Florida state judges. It is not a part of the Florida Supreme Court and operates under rules it establishes for itself. The JQC has no authority over federal judges or judges in other states. Complaints against judges must be filed with the JQC, not with the Supreme Court. The JQC can be reached at:
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