Lawsuits sought to determine patient's wishes, then rights
WASHINGTON -- The legal outcome of the Terri Schiavo case turned on two questions: whether Schiavo would have chosen to remain on a feeding tube while severely brain-damaged, and whether her constitutional rights were violated by the state court trial that determined her wishes.
The first question was essentially settled in a 2000 trial before a Florida judge, after her husband, Michael Schiavo, petitioned a court for permission to withdraw the tube and her parents objected.
The goal of the trial was to determine what Terri Schiavo would have wanted, because she made no living will to state her wishes. The conflict was fought in a murky area of the law known as ''substituted judgment" doctrine, under which a surrogate decision-maker makes an educated guess about what a patient probably would have chosen, based on past statements and personal values.
The case was assigned to Judge George W. Greer of Florida's Sixth Judicial Circuit, which covers Pinellas and Pasco counties. Trial accounts say it concentrated on testimony from Michael Schiavo's brother and sister-in-law. They recounted a conversation with Terri Schiavo after the 1988 funeral of the brothers' grandmother, whom doctors had kept alive against her wishes.
The brother, Scott Schiavo, testified that Terri Schiavo said: ''If I ever go like that, just let me go. Don't leave me there. I don't want to be kept alive on a machine."
In addition, Michael Schiavo said his wife once told him while they were watching a documentary about severely injured people that she would not want to be kept on artificial life support .
Terri Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, and her siblings were suspicious. They said Michael Schiavo did not mention that his wife had expressed that wish until 1997, seven years after a heart seizure that left her brain-damaged. By then he was dating another woman, with whom he now has two children. They insisted that their daughter would not have chosen to die.
Mary Schindler testified that she talked with her daughter during the famous case of Karen Ann Quinlan, whose parents waged a legal battle to take her off a ventilator after she fell into a persistent vegetative state in 1975. Schindler said her daughter remarked: ''If they take her off, she might die. Just leave her alone, and she will die whenever."
Michael Schiavo's lawyer, however, pointed out that Terri Schiavo was not yet a teenager when the Quinlan case was making headlines. Greer ruled that there was ''clear and convincing evidence" that she would have chosen to be taken off the feeding tube.
Her parents appealed up to the Florida Supreme Court, but higher courts consistently held that there was no reason to overturn Greer's conclusion.
Earlier this month, Congress and President Bush enacted a special law giving federal courts jurisdiction to review whether any of Terri Schiavo's constitutional rights were being violated.
Her parents filed a new lawsuit, which was assigned to US District Court Judge James Whittemore in Tampa. They asked Whittemore to issue a temporary restraining order reinserting the feeding tube. Whittemore declined to do so.
The Schindlers argued that their daughter's due process rights had been violated because she had not had her own lawyer during the state trial. But Whittemore said that the parents' lawyer had vigorously represented the point of view that her feeding tube should remain in place.
The Schindlers also contended that Greer infringed on Terri Schiavo's right to religious freedom because removing the tube was contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church, of which Schiavo had been a practicing member. Whittemore rejected that argument.
