Bitter family saga with nationwide repercussions

US: The Schiavo case will place further pressure on President Bush to appoint judges with conservative sympathies, writes Conor…

US: The Schiavo case will place further pressure on President Bush to appoint judges with conservative sympathies, writes Conor O'Clery in New York.

The scene inside the hospice contrasted sharply with the tumultuous atmosphere outside. In Terri Schiavo's room, soft music played, including Debussy's Claire de Lune. Terri's left arm rested on a stuffed dog. A cloth rabbit and kitten lay on her bed. On the side table was a vase of flowers. There were religious pictures on the wall.

Yet this oasis of calm, as described by visitors in recent days, was the epicentre of a bitter family dispute that has riveted the nation, galvanised political and religious partisans, and brought Florida close to a constitutional crisis.

Close relatives could not even visit Terri in the room at the same time. Terri's husband Michael, who spent most of the last few days at her side, withdrew to another room when her parents Bob and Mary Schindler came in for brief vigils - with his permission. They never saw each other.

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It wasn't always like that. After Terri suffered brain damage in 1990, Michael and the parents were close for a while. Terri and Michael had met in 1982 when they were both students at Bucks County Community College, near Philadelphia. They got married two years later when Terri was 22. The couple lived with Bob and Mary Schindler in the basement of their Pennsylvania home, then followed them to St Petersburg, Florida, when Bob Schindler sold his construction business and moved there to live.

Terri, a diminutive, shy woman who loved animals, music and basketball, found work in an insurance agency. Michael got a job in a beachside restaurant. They remained a close-knit family. The Schindlers paid the rent of their condominium. Michael called them Mom and Dad.

There was a problem with Terri's health, however. Overweight at school, she reportedly suffered from bulimia, an eating disorder marked by a cycle of eating binges and vomiting, and had lost considerable weight.

One night in February 1990 Terri passed out. Michael said she fell unconscious on the floor. It was 10-15 minutes before medical help arrived. During that time her heart stopped pumping blood to her brain. The bulimia apparently had caused a potassium deficiency that provoked heart failure.

For months Michael Schiavo and the Schindlers jointly took care of Terri in the Schindlers' house in St Petersburg, refusing to concede she could not recover from the brain damage she suffered. At one point Michael took her to California for treatment but it didn't work. After that, she was admitted to a nursing home and kept alive through a feeding tube. Michael Schiavo, who had been appointed Terri's guardian, became a devoted visitor, so demanding that in the words of a court-appointed researcher, he became a "nursing home administrator's nightmare".

Meanwhile, Schiavo took a malpractice case against the obstetrician who had been treating Terri for infertility. In January 2003 he was awarded $300,000 for loss of companionship. A further sum of $750,000 was put in trust for her care (of which $40,000-$50,000 remains). It was the money that ignited the family rift. Bob Schindler said he and his wife wanted the money to go towards aggressive recovery therapy rather than just care. Michael Schiavo maintained that they fell out when Bob Schindler demanded some of the settlement money to make up for what he had spent on the couple. As the family split, the Schindlers tried but failed to have Michael removed as guardian.

Four years later, in 1997, Michael Schiavo told the Schindlers that Terri had mentioned to him several times she would not want to be kept alive in a vegetative state and that he wanted the feeding tube removed. The parents would not hear of it. By this time Michael had found a new partner, Jodi Centonze, with whom he would have two children, and they suspected his motives.

Michael's brother, Scott Schiavo, and sister-in-law, Joan, backed up his testimony. But Terri's brother, Bobby, said he was close to his sister and she would never have said such a thing.

In April 2001 the case came before Judge George Greer, a circuit court judge who was also a Republican and a devout Baptist. He accepted Michael's word about Terri's wishes, and the evidence of a court-appointed doctor that her brain damage was so severe she would never have any cognitive abilities, and ordered the feeding tube removed. It was reconnected when a former girlfriend of Michael Schiavo cast doubt on his testimony, but she later changed her mind. Judge Greer ruled again to have the tube removed. The fight got ugly and public as the parents pursued legal action. Michael refused to divorce Terri, on grounds that her parents would not respect her wishes to be allowed to die.

The Schindlers released a video-tape that appeared to show her interacting with visitors to make the point that Terri had some degree of consciousness.

When the tube was removed again in October 2003 Florida Governor Jeb Bush intervened to get the state legislature to pass "Terri's Law", and it was reinserted after six days. The Florida high court then declared the law unconstitutional. The tube was removed for a last time on Friday, March 18th.

As right-to-life activists and family sympathisers bombarded legislators to do something, Republican leaders in the US Congress rushed through an extraordinary law in the middle of the night to refer the case to a federal court. President Bush, who had rushed back from Texas, got out of bed at 1am to sign it. The Schindlers' appeal was rejected by the federal court, the appeals court and the US Supreme Court.

Crowds of supporters, led by anti-abortion activists like Randall Terry, gathered outside the hospice in Pinella Pines to maintain a prayer vigil.

They denounced Michael Schiavo and Judge Greer. A man was arrested in North Carolina for offering $250,000 to anyone who would kill Michael Schiavo. And Judge Greer, who was expelled by his Baptist congregation, was placed under police guard.

There was enormous pressure on Jeb Bush to do something.

Conservatives commentators like Pat Buchanan charged that a state execution was taking place on a helpless woman. Governor Bush should "go in there, take that woman out of there, reinsert the tube and tell Judge Greer - go ahead, hold me in contempt," he said.

Such an action - which would have provoked a constitutional crisis - very nearly happened, according to the Miami Herald. A team of agents from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, acting under a legal kink that allowed a judge's order to be frozen when appealed by an agency, prepared to seize Schiavo.

They set out to the hospice in Pinellas Park but backed away from confrontation when local sheriffs, who had sealed off the building, said they would enforce the judge's order. Later Governor Jeb Bush said he did not have the legal authority to take Terri Schiavo into protective custody.

By this time the issue had transcended America's partisan divide. Rev Jesse Jackson of the Rainbow Coalition came to Florida to pray with the parents for Terri's civil right to life. There was something "not morally sound" about a person dying unnecessarily, he said. Civil rights lawyer Alan Dershowitz pointed out that if someone were to come into the room and murder Terri, it would be a crime, and that refusing her water had the same effect.

Several figures from the left including Ralph Nader, Al Gore's lawyer David Boies and Senator Tom Harkin called for nourishment to be restored. The temperature rose as symbolic attempts to bring water into the hospice were rebuffed. This resulted in some 50 arrests, including children sent to police lines by their parents and handcuffed, scenes that heightened the charged atmosphere.

Some TV commentators like MSNBC host Joe Scarborough saw the crisis as a fight between the judicial and legislative branch, saying that "judges are willing to let her die because they don't want to cede power". Former judge Catherine Crier ofCourt TV retorted that if one wanted to give the president or Congress the right to determine what happened to the life of one individual, they would have to rewrite America's founding documents. Hundreds of people had feeding tubes disconnected each week, she said, and "just because my parents would want me to stay alive because they loved me, I would not want the courts to deny my right to die if I did not want to be hooked up".

There were only two questions that mattered, said Peter Beinart, editor of the New Republic - did she want to die and who had the right to make that decision - and the courts had made their decision.

In rejecting the Schindlers' final appeal on Wednesday, Judge Stanley Birch of the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals - an appointee of the first president George Bush - expressed the view of the 12-judge panel (with two dissenters) that the law passed by Congress last week was unconstitutional.

Congress and the president had acted "at odds with the Founding Fathers' blueprint for the governance of a free people", said Judge Birch. He scathingly dismissed the "popular epithet" of "activist judges", saying that an "activist judge" was one who decided a controversy according to personal conviction rather than the law. Public opinion backed the judges, according to a number of polls, despite widespread and heartfelt sympathy for the parents.

The legal and constitutional issues will not disappear with the death of Terri Schiavo. "We've got to rein in the judiciary," said right-to-life activist Randall Terry outside the hospice yesterday. Republican Congressman Tom Feeney from Florida called for an end of the "imperial judiciary". President Bush will feel more pressure than before from a core constituency, the religious right, to appoint judges with conservative sympathies.

And there will undoubtedly be attempts to write new state legislation to tip the balance in the parents' favour in future similar cases.

Meanwhile, lawyers across America report they are inundated with people wanting to make living wills, so that their last wishes are known and they never end up like Terri Schiavo, fought over by a bitterly divided family.