Well, this narrows it down to bad attorneys for Terri or bad Justices on the Supreme Court. We know the attorneys for Terri were at a disadvantage because of money. We also know that the Justices on the Supreme Court have speaking engagements to meet and can not be bothered.
Gary Amos, in his memorable essay, said every judge involved in the Terri Schiavo case, including all nine sitting justices on the Supreme Court, should be impeached by Congress under constitutional definitions of misbehavior. I posted links to both his essay and peripheral comments; must have been in our last Terri thread. Let me see what I can find in a hurry...
Not the shortest essay, but rich in detail and worth every moment you put into it.
Terri's parents' attorneys were at a disadvantage because of money. Terri's attorneys were non-existent.
Let me correct my previous comment. Amos did not say the judges "should" be impeached, he said they MUST be impeached by Congress, because they are accessories to murder.
>> You can't grow peanuts on your own land or install a toilet capable of disposing two tissues in one flush because of federal government intervention. But Congress demands a review of the process that goes into a governmental determination to kill an innocent American woman -- and that goes too far!
>> It's not a radical extension of current constitutional doctrines -- even the legitimate ones! -- for the federal government to assert a constitutional right to life that cannot be denied without due process of law under the Fifth and 14th Amendments. Congress didn't ask for much, just the same due process John Wayne Gacy got.
But people even stupider than lawyers have picked up on the vague rumblings from "most consistent constitutionalist" aspirants and begun to claim that Congress' action is an affront to "limited government."
The Terri Schiavo story started on February 25, 1990. (We really should start it on the 24th because Terri and Michael had a terrible fight about her spending $80 to get her hair colored -- a fight that may well have cost her her life that night.) Her story and her life reached a sad end with her death on March 31, 2005. That is fifteen years and five weeks later.
52 weeks times 15.1 years = approximately 785 weeks for the whole story to play out. Congress authorized the federal courts to review the case de novo about one week before Terri died. So, timewise, Congress became involved when the story was 99.87% over.
Congress's 1/8 of 1% involvement, we should further note, had 0.00% effect on the case. None. Zip. It did not delay Terri's death by one minute. The courts spent a couple of days refusing to review, and that was that. Then everyone watched the court-ordered execution of an innocent American citizen come to its grisly conclusion.
The "invervention" argument is so much fog. The real question arose fifteen years earlier. How did a healthy young woman, asleep in bed, suddenly end up on the hallway floor, face down, in cardiac arrest and near death, shortly after her husband came home from his late hours job that Saturday night? There is only one witness and he doesn't have an alibi.