Road to a Kill
The Judge Who Didn’t Pay Attention to Terri Schiavo’s Witnesses
by Lydia McGrew
Four years after Terri Schiavo was killed by dehydration over thirteen days, dying on March 31, 2005, the transcripts of witness testimony from her trial in 2000 have finally become available online. And what the transcripts reveal—in full detail and in a form everyone can read—is a shocking tale of bias and sheer incompetence on the part of Judge George Greer.
Greer’s written opinion from the trial has been available online for years, ever since Terri’s case became a cause célèbre. But it has been impossible to evaluate his reasoning without access to the testimony on which he based his decision. Greer concluded that there was “clear and convincing evidence” that Terri would have wanted her food and water discontinued, but he cited his evidence only allusively. Beyond the lawyers connected with the case, almost no one has been able to check his statements against the testimony itself—until now.
And the transcripts amply show that it would be an understatement to say that Greer’s conclusion was not supported by the evidence. The testimony describing conversations in which Terri supposedly affirmed that she would have wanted a feeding tube withdrawn is, at most, only indirectly relevant to that crucial question. The witnesses who, according to Greer, gave “clear and convincing evidence” of her wish to be dehydrated to death testified instead to statements that made no reference to tube feeding.
Vague Machine Talk
Consider Scott Schiavo, Terri’s brother-in-law. Scott testified that Terri sat next to him at a luncheon following his grandmother’s funeral, at which he and the other relatives were talking disapprovingly of the grandmother’s care in her last days. Terri had supposedly 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.” Scott’s testimony made it obvious that the “machine” in question was a ventilator:
It was something that . . . knowing my grandmother, it was upsetting to see, to walk in to say goodbye to your grandmother and the machine has her lifting off the bed for air. Her chest pumping up.
But Terri herself had nothing more than a feeding tube; she was not being kept alive on a machine.
Or consider Joan Schiavo, Terri’s sister-in-law (married to a third Schiavo brother). Here is the crucial portion of her testimony:
We had watched a movie one time on television. It was about somebody. I don’t remember. It was about a guy who had an accident and he was in a comma [ sic]. There was no help for him. We had stated that if that ever happened to one of us, in our lifetime, we would not want to go through that. That we would want it stated in our will we would want the tubes and everything taken out.
Lydia McGrew is a homemaker and homeschooling mother living in Michigan. Her publications in analytic philosophy, many co-written with her husband, Tim, have appeared in journals such as Mind, Erkenntnis, and Philosophia Christi. In her spare time, she blogs at What's Wrong with the World (www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net).
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