Establishing a precedent

The attorneys are poised to set the appeals in motion. As the date of the execution of the method that would enable the death draws near the flurry of activity begins anew. Attorneys file an appeal with the Florida 2nd District Court of Appeals in Lakeland, Florida. The appeal is rejected by the court. With that rejection, the mode of death is begun. With time of the essence, the United States Congress springs to action with the House and Senate passing a bill to place the decisions to continue or terminate the mode of death to the U.S. District Court for a Federal Judge to review. The bill is signed by the President of the United States who has traveled on a Sunday, in the interest of time, to sign the bill, even though it was after midnight. The appeal was denied by the U.S. District Judge and promptly appealed to the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta, Georgia. That Court denies the appeal sending the attorneys into late-night frenzy to make the final appeal to the United States Supreme Court. With the appeal request received by the Supreme Court Justice who receives appeals from the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals from Atlanta, the word goes out with the decision that the United States Supreme Court declines to review the case.

No, this is not a passage from John Grisham’s best-seller novel, “The Chamber” where a convicted murderer who had been on death row for years was fighting for a last-minute appeal that followed a similar appeal process. Nor is this a passage from any other death-row inmate who has been convicted of a capital crime and sentenced to death administered by the state. This is the true account of the activities that surrounded the late Terri Schiavo’s case in 2005 whose feeding tube that had sustained her for the last fifteen years of her life had been disconnected so that she could die a slow death through starving.


During the last weeks of her life the debate raged in the 24-hour news cycle of the cable and network media. Those groups who represented the position of death with dignity or the right to die listed their reasons why the feeding tube should have remained disconnected. On the other hand, those groups who represented the position of the right to life listed their reasons why the feeding tube should have been reconnected while the debates moved on to some kind of resolution. This kind of issue always lies at the base of a much larger issue that that continues to be debated and will likely never be fully settled. Of course life and death are issues of great magnitude and deserve the full attention of serious discussion. One issue that looms in my mind is that of legal precedence.


Our country’s legal system is based on laws. Those laws are built upon cases that represent judgments having been made. Those cases then are used as examples in dealing with subsequent similar cases. With the Terri Schiavo issue our legal system conveniently slipped this case into the process of case law that helps establish the building of similar cases that discusses whether a person may stay alive or allowed to die at the will of a third party. As time passes, and cases build, this will likely no longer be a personal decision for individuals or families to make, but will be open for review by the courts and based on past cases. It literally puts the decision of quality of life, or life itself into the hands of justices who sit on the bench and try to make moral decisions based upon past civil decisions that may or may not have had the same implications individually as the current case under their review. And as each new case is reviewed the envelope is pushed further and further with more mitigating circumstances that will allow justices to have far-reaching control over the time and situations where life can be terminated.


That was the second thing this case opened up, a further emphasis on judicial review focused not just on social issues, but on the quality and length of our very lives. We see that creeping judicial review in other situations all the time. Obscenity laws that really can not define what is obscene in any one place over another can allow for bans on so-called soft pornography in one place but encourage hard-core pornography in another. Hence, we move from the word “damn” being uttered by Clark Gable in “Gone With the Wind” to four-letter words and images of nudity trying to break its way into network television. The same thing applies to a person’s life. One only has to look at Jack Kevorkian’s activities, and his help in assisting so-called terminal patients to commit suicide, to see how it may start with a case that seems obviously clear-cut. But as he moved on, the definition of “terminal” seemed to shift from a clear-cut situation to one that ultimately landed him in prison for “helping” someone who was not “terminally ill” to die. Additionally, it cleared the path for a third party to provide the means for the person to end their life.

One of the reasons why we continually slip and slide in these situations is because we constantly try to exclude any reference to our Creator. We place these decisions of morality into the hands of judicial review and charge them to make decisions without the benefit of any foundation of moral values other than case precedents in civil law. Unfortunately, historical decisions about human life based on that foundation has brought little but the devaluation of life at the beginning through abortion, and may have the same effect during the ending part of life as well. Once again, get ready to experience the onslaught of attorneys focusing on different facets of accident/injuries, illnesses and other conditions that interrupt the quality of life with litigation to place our own lives into the hands of judicial review.

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