| How did he blow it?
All his areguments are of the form, "Greer screwed up here, Greer screwed up there." He thus drags the whole Greer proceeding into what should have been a de novo trial, and makes the issue to be decided whether Greer screwed up. Whittemore looks at the record, doesn't see any obvious place where Greer screwed up (procedurally) as alleged by the Schindlers' lawyer, and concludes that the Schindlers' case has little chance of succeeding. In fairness to Whittemore, it looks to me like he is trying to tell the lawyer to come back with a different case, one that turns on potential violations of Terri Schiavo's civil rights, and not on anything that happened in the state court proceeding. Whittemore even goes so far as to highlight the fact that the law Congress passed called for a de novo trial, and then points out that by dragging the state court case into the new proceeding, the lawyer has essentially thrown away the opportunity he had to start fresh. No, I have not called anybody to advise them of my expert opinion on this matter. Hell, I'm not even a lawyer. But if I can see this, why can't the damned lawyer? |
If you read Whittemore's decision, what the Schindlers' lawyer did was treat the proceeding as an appeal, not as a de novo trial about whether Terri Schiavo's civil rights are/were violated.