The Legal Death of Terri Schiavo

This article, found at First Things and written by Robert T. Miller, a new professor of law at Villanova University School of Law, is the best treatment that I've seen on the Schiavo fiasco. He nails it on the head by identifying what was wrong with that mess and where we need to go from here, if we care about it.

Here is an excerpt:

In short, the courts followed the law precisely when they decided that none of Terri Schiavo’s rights under the Constitution and laws of the United States had been violated. How then could the result be so unjust? The answer is perfectly simple: The substantive laws of Florida expressly authorize a murderous result. Those laws, like the laws of most states, expressly provide that a guardian may starve to death a ward in a persistent vegetative state, defined in Florida to mean “a permanent and irreversible condition of unconsciousness in which there is (a) the absence of voluntary action of any kind, [and] (b) an inability to communicate or interact purposefully with the environment.” Substantively unjust laws, enforced in accordance with their terms and by due process of law, lead to substantively unjust results.


Laws authorizing a guardian to starve to death a ward are profoundly immoral, even as applied to those who would have wanted to die; we do not accommodate suicides. But in hundreds of cases around the country every year, such laws are enforced, and hundreds of people die like Terri Schiavo. The only extraordinary thing about the Schiavo case is that her parents have done everything in their power to prevent her death, with the result that Schiavo has received much more process and much more publicity than others to whom the same thing has happened. One commentator described the Schiavo case as the “crime of the century.” In fact it is a banal, run-of-the-mill crime of a kind that happens every day in the United States.


And for this, we cannot blame the courts. The fault lies not in our judges but in ourselves, for we have created a society in which the law allows the strong and healthy to determine that some of the weak and infirm have lives not worth living and then to kill them.

The remainder of the article very carefully covers the whole legal process and does an excellent job of illuminating a very emotional subject... something that needs to be done for such a vitally important issue.