Michael claims he loves Terri and he has said it on numerous occasions, but he treats her in a way I don’t think most of us would treat our own pets.
—BOBBY SCHINDLER, TERRI SCHIAVO’S BROTHER1
This might come as a surprise, but I was deeply troubled after my initial visit with Terri on Christmas Eve, 2004. You’d think I should have been encouraged by her healthy appearance, by her fully animated behavior, and by the glowing interaction Terri shared with her parents. No question about it, she’d surpassed any expectation I had of her vitality. I came away from her presence renewed in my resolve to fight for her life.
Still, as I headed for a Christmas Eve dinner with my family that evening, I felt agitated. I couldn’t stop thinking about the numerous injustices surrounding Terri’s case—from Terri’s initial medical malpractice award in 1992 to the sheer unfairness that Terri was not permitted home for her favorite holiday. The lack of basic human kindness toward this disabled woman by her husband and the court gnawed at my spirit and trampled on my sense of fairness.
Come to think of it, one of my law professors at Duke University had cautioned me about getting too passionately involved in cases. Once, in my oral advocacy class, we were assigned to present arguments in a mock trial. When I was finished making my case, the professor said, ‘‘David, you’re acting like this really matters. If tomorrow you had to go to court and argue for the other side, as a lawyer you should be able to do that.’’
He must have seen the look of surprise on my face. He continued, ‘‘Trust me, you need to disconnect yourself from the process. You cannot care—it’s not your problem. You’ll have a heart attack or an ulcer or a mental breakdown. Without a professional distance, the practice of law will destroy you.’’ I’m sure he thought he was giving me sound advice. I respected his opinion, and in practical terms it’s pretty good advice.
However, I’ve never been able to do that. I cannot distance myself from what I believe. To me, when I go to court, I have to believe I’m on the side of truth. I could never stand before God—or even look myself in the mirror—and say, ‘‘Sure, I fought for Terri, but it was just a job. I could just as easily have represented the other side.’’
These were several of the unsettling issues that grieved me as I left the hospice on Christmas Eve—concerns I still haven’t fully come to terms with.
I SWEAR TO TELL THE TRUTH
Two years after his wife’s disability occurred, Michael Schiavo sued Terri’s general practitioner and gynecologist for malpractice, claiming they had failed to realize that Terri was bulimic (though her autopsy did not reveal signs of bulimia). At the time of the trial, Michael told the jury and Terri’s family that he was committed to taking care of his wife for the rest of his life. Through what was at times an emotionally charged testimony, Michael made his intentions clear:
1. He was committed to getting Terri treatment.
2. He was committed to keeping her alive.
3. He was committed to doing everything he could to help improve the quality of her life.
On November 5, 1992, Michael Schiavo took the witness stand. Under oath and under direct examination by his own lawyer, Michael fought back tears as he affirmed his desire to care for his wife, Terri:
| QUESTION: | Why did you want to learn to be a nurse? |
| SCHIAVO: | Because I enjoy it and I want to learn more how to take care of Terri. |
| QUESTION: | You’re a young man. Your life is ahead of you. When you look up the road, what do you see for yourself? |
| SCHIAVO: | I see myself hopefully finishing school and taking care of my wife. |
| QUESTION: | Where do you want to take care of your wife? |
| SCHIAVO: | I want to bring her home. |
| QUESTION: | If you had the resources available to you, if you had the equipment and the people, would you do that? |
| SCHIAVO: | Yes, I would, in a heartbeat. |
As you might expect, Bob and Mary Schindler were elated to know that their son-in-law was committed to caring for their daughter. They were especially heartened that Terri might finally have enough money to receive the professional rehabilitation and speech therapy she so badly needed. Naturally, the prospect of receiving funds to cover the mounting medical bills was a great relief too. No longer would the Schindlers have to initiate fund-raisers, hold bake sales, and scrape together money for Terri’s treatment.
Originally, Michael sought $20 million in malpractice damages for Terri’s future medical care and therapy. This figure was based on the prediction that Terri’s life expectancy was another 51.27 years—a projection made by expert witnesses called by Michael’s legal team. Part of the money requested was also for his loss of companionship.
Although Michael had already begun to move on in his personal life, during the malpractice trial his attorney asked specifically about Michael’s relationship with Terri:
| QUESTION: | How do you feel about being married to Terri now? |
| SCHIAVO: | I feel wonderful. She’s my life and I wouldn’t trade her for the world. I believe in my . . . I believe in my wedding vows. |
| QUESTION: | You want to take a minute? |
| SCHIAVO: | Yeah. |
Michael’s eyes brimmed with tears as he wrestled to keep his emotions under control. The jury watched in silence as Michael dabbed at the corners of his eyes and fought to compose himself.
| QUESTION: | You okay? |
| SCHIAVO: | Yeah. I’m sorry. |
| QUESTION: | Have—you said you believe in your wedding vows. What do you mean by that? |
| SCHIAVO: | I believe in the vows that I took with my wife— through sickness, in health, for richer or poorer. I married my wife because I love her and I want to spend the rest of my life with her. I’m going to do that. |
On November 10, 1992, the jury returned its verdict. Without going into all of the details, suffice it to say that the award was a fraction of the financial windfall Michael sought. After an appeal, on January 27, 1993, the court approved a final payment of $2 million.
Of the approximately $1.2 million left after paying attorney fees from the jury award and a previous settlement with Terri’s personal doctor, 70 percent was designated for Terri’s needs and 30 percent went to Michael. Not that the percentages were of much consequence. As Terri’s guardian, Michael ultimately controlled the entire amount. Almost immediately following the jury award, a number of red flags surfaced in his behavior. The same month the malpractice award was approved by the court, Michael refused to honor his promise to the Schindlers (and to the jury) to use the money for Terri to begin receiving advanced rehabilitation therapy.
Indeed, the Schindlers’ sense of euphoria was short-lived. On February 14, 1993, just two brief weeks after the malpractice award had been finalized, Bob and Mary had a heated falling-out with Michael. They had asked him to honor his agreement regarding the malpractice jury award for Terri and place her in a rehab facility. He, in turn, threatened a legal injunction forbidding family members to visit Terri at her nursing home. Furthermore, Michael instructed the nursing home staff not to release any medical information concerning Terri to her family.
The Schindlers were stunned beyond belief. But things would only get worse. Michael would later claim that a memory had suddenly surfaced: Terri would not really want to live in a disabled condition. In fact, although the money they needed was now there, Terri received absolutely no rehabilitative services, swallowing tests, or therapy of any kind between 1992 and her death in 2005.
You might want to read that again.
Absolutely nothing for more than a dozen years.
The timing of Michael’s change of heart is deeply troubling. While you and I might question the way the mind works when remembering past details, the Schindlers could only wonder why Michael very much wanted Terri alive when he anticipated a jury awarding him more money than many people will see in their entire lifetime. Then, after the check arrived, Michael’s story changed: Terri really wouldn’t want to live anymore.
Why the sudden revision of his story?
As Bobby Schindler, Terri’s brother, would later ask, ‘‘Which Michael are we to believe? The one who promised he would take care of his wife for the rest of his life, or the one who says these were Terri’s death wishes?’’2 And so, for the Schindler family, a twelve-year battle over Terri’s life was set in motion with that jury award.
For his part, Michael entered into a committed long-term relationship with Jodi Centonze. He and Jodi began living together in 1993 and subsequently became engaged. Michael started a new family and fathered two children with Jodi, while blocking the way for the Schindlers to bring Terri back into their own family. Michael continued to live with Jodi and their children after Terri’s death in 2005; they were married in January of 2006.
SHUT IN AND SHUT OUT
That Christmas Eve afternoon in 2004 as I drove away from the Woodside Hospice in Pinellas Park, Florida, another aspect of Terri’s case was bothering me. Back on April 10, 2000, Terri had been moved from her nursing home to a hospice; I couldn’t figure out why. She wasn’t terminal. She wasn’t dying. She wasn’t comatose.
She wasn’t even sick.
To the contrary, Terri was very much alive. The Terri I saw was doing remarkably well, especially when you consider that this woman had only very minimal health care for over a decade.
Typically, patients with incurable illnesses are sent to a hospice to die, not to recover. In fact, generally, a person can only be admitted into hospice care if death is reasonably imminent—as a rule of thumb— within six months of admittance. Despite testimony at her malpractice trial of her anticipated longevity, Terri was admitted and confined to a hospice surrounded by death and the dying for years in violation of the practices generally governing such facilities.
What’s more, Judge Greer’s court was legally required to supervise guardianship cases like Terri’s. Why didn’t he intervene? Why wasn’t Terri permitted to go home or to an appropriate extended care center? In truth, Terri would still be in a hospice room today had she not been dehydrated and starved to death. Which, again, begs the question, why was Terri restricted to the walls of Woodside Hospice after 2000?
An even more disturbing thought was the fact that Michael Schiavo’s pro-euthanasia attorney, George Felos, had served as chairman of the board of directors at the very hospice where Terri was sent. Judge Greer subsequently denied several petitions by the Schindlers to return Terri to the nursing home.
Another serious injustice from my perspective, having visited Terri many times, was Judge Greer’s ruling on February 11, 2000, authorizing the first withdrawal of Terri’s feeding tube. In his death order Judge Greer declared that Terri was ‘‘unconscious, unaware, and without cognition.’’ But how could the judge fairly make that assessment? He never saw Terri—and she had never come to court even though she logically would be the star witness! Terri had the most to gain and the most to lose in this case. She was the person with the right to decide whether she received medical treatment or not, yet she never attended court and was never afforded a lawyer of her own throughout the entire court process.
Worse, even when hit by a tidal wave of controversy following his ruling, Judge Greer didn’t make time to drive across town or to have Terri come to court to see her for himself—just to be sure.
Why not? Certainly Judge Greer’s conduct and decisions were consistently upheld on appeal by other judges who also had never seen Terri in person.
But contrary to Judge Greer’s arm’s-length assessment, I know from personal observation that Terri went to bed at night, woke up in the morning, and functioned throughout the day without the aid of any special machinery or extraordinary care. She breathed on her own. She was not ‘‘unconscious,’’ nor was she ‘‘unaware.’’ She could have traveled across town—or across the country!—without jeopardizing her health. And though she was disabled, all of her bodily systems could have kept her alive for many years—with one exception:
She required assistance at mealtime.
I was also baffled that Terri was not allowed out of her room to socialize. What harm could there be in visiting with others or attending the occasional hospice function? Evidently, her guardian, Michael Schiavo, controlled Terri’s life as a disabled woman much as he reportedly had done when they were living under the same roof.
I would later learn from Jackie Rhodes, Terri’s friend from work, that ‘‘Michael was very controlling. [Terri] was not allowed to go anywhere after work. She had to go straight home after work. He would monitor the miles on her car.’’3 How the court could allow Terri’s husband to isolate her from human companionship was beyond me. Was this really the same man whose tears had convinced a medical malpractice jury that his desire was to spend the rest of his life caring for Terri? I wondered what the jury’s decision would have been if they’d known that Terri would remain deprived of medical therapy, rehabilitation, and human companionship, and that she would spend years in a hospice surrounded by a dying world—often with the blinds drawn on her windows by orders of her guardian/husband.
Where was the basic human kindness?
TERRI AND KAREN ANN QUINLAN
The Schindlers’ legal team was contacted early in 2005 by an attorney affiliated with the Florida legislature regarding a mistake he noticed Judge Greer had made in his 2000 death order. Using that information, the Schindlers filed a new motion on March 2, 2005, alleging that during the 2000 trial to determine Terri’s end-of-life wishes, Judge George Greer made an error in determining that clear and convincing evidence existed to support Terri’s oral end-of-life wishes not to be kept alive with an artificial feeding tube.
Attorneys for the Schindlers pointed out that in his February 2000 order authorizing Terri’s death, Judge Greer made a clear mistake in discounting the testimony of Terri’s close friend Diane Meyer. Diane had testified that in 1982 Terri told her she did not agree with the decision by Karen Ann Quinlan’s parents to take their daughter off life support. Judge Greer stated in his 2000 order that he found Diane’s testimony ‘‘believable’’ but concluded that this conversation could not have occurred in 1982, after Terri had reached the age of majority, but must have occurred when Terri was only eleven or twelve years old, in 1976, the year Judge Greer believed Karen Ann Quinlan had died. Terri’s mother, Mary Schindler, also had testified that Terri did not approve of Karen Ann Quinlan’s parents’ decision to remove her artificial life support. But Mary became confused on cross-examination about what year it might have been when she and Terri talked about this situation.
Judge Greer’s mistake was that Karen Ann Quinlan did not die in 1976, when she was taken off life support (but not her feeding tube, which was not then considered to be life support). Instead, she lived until 1985. Therefore, Diane’s use of the present tense in court when describing her 1982 conversation with Terri was consistent with the facts. Mary Schindler’s testimony that Terri was an adult when they conversed about the subject was also confirmed by this mistake in the date of Quinlan’s death. The mistake in dates had apparently not been previously noticed. Was the evidence of Terri’s death wish still ‘‘clear and convincing,’’ we asked.
Judge Greer denied the Schindlers’ motion to overturn his 2000 order. He ruled that this mistake was inconsequential because he had not been interested in Terri’s views with regard to other people, but only with regard to what she would want for herself.
If Judge Greer’s 2000 order to end Terri’s life had been a criminal death sentence, this mistake might have entitled Terri to a new trial. But since Judge Greer’s death order was a civil death order, the first of its kind in the nation, there was no precedent for a new civil trial and Judge Greer’s original order was upheld, notwithstanding this critical mistake.
LARRY KING, BLOWN AWAY
During the late summer of 2004, a series of powerful hurricanes crisscrossed Florida, leaving massive devastation in their wake. In six short weeks four hurricanes hammered the Sunshine State: Charley (August 13), Frances (September 4), Ivan (September 16), and Jeanne (September 26). Floridians were stunned by the relentless barrage of severe weather and, tragically, suffered more than $50 billion in damages. Nearly a year had flown by since October of 2003, when the Florida state legislature voted overwhelmingly in favor of Terri’s Law. With its passage the Schindlers believed they had received the miracle we prayed for during our initial meeting. But Michael Schiavo and his legal team were relentless in their efforts to enforce the original death order and to oppose any action by the Florida legislature or the governor to keep Terri alive.
On September 23, 2004, just as Hurricane Jeanne was about to unleash her fury on Florida, we received tragic news: The Florida State Supreme Court had ruled that Terri’s Law was unconstitutional.
Like watching precious property swept away by a hurricane, the Schindlers were stunned as they watched Terri’s hard-fought legal protection evaporate before their eyes.
Just four days later, Bob, Mary, and I were scheduled to travel to California and tell the Schindlers’ story on Larry King Live to millions of viewers. One problem: With Jeanne bearing down on us, the Tampa and Orlando airports had closed. Atlanta was in question because of the direction of the storm. In fact, most of Florida was under emergency or evacuation orders. Everybody either had left or had battened down the hatches.
The only airport that looked hopeful was Miami International— on the opposite coast and 250 miles away. Larry King’s extremely helpful and kind staff in Washington, D.C., asked me the question, ‘‘Can you get to Miami?’’ Bob, Mary, and I decided that for Terri we needed to try.
Granted, residents were advised to stay home if at all possible— except in the case of an emergency. With Terri’s life on the line and the opportunity to share the Schindlers’ plight with the nation, we figured venturing out qualified as an emergency. On September 26, Bob, Mary, a staff member, and I piled into a car and prepared for the ride of our lives. For about 250 miles, we navigated heavy downpours, high winds, and horrendous thunderstorms as Jeanne clobbered the state.
As we drove through the storm, we saw the devastation that Hurricane Charley had left in its wake. For a number of miles where the eye of the storm had passed, entire exits from the highway were completely leveled. For miles there were no gas stations, no mini-marts. Nothing. All that remained were the toppled carcasses of buildings picked over by Charley. We pressed on.
The farther we drove from Tampa Bay, the storm conditions, while harsh, appeared to ease. Thankfully, we arrived safely. We stayed at a hotel at the airport and grabbed a few hours of rest. Early the next day, although drained from the ride the night before, we escaped the hurricane and took off without further incident to Los Angeles.
Looking back, I believe God knew the Schindlers desperately needed to be encouraged. When the Florida State Supreme Court struck down Terri’s Law, it was, needless to say, a huge blow to Bob and Mary and their family. With these recent court rulings and the details about the Schindlers’ case starting to dominate the news, complete strangers would introduce themselves. This explained why the flight attendants and a number of passengers on the plane came up to encourage these parents throughout the trip. In some ways that flight to California turned into a pep rally at forty thousand feet!
After we touched down in Los Angeles, I received a phone call. A producer with the Larry King show had some bad news. She informed me that Larry had spent the night before in the hospital, suffering from a bad case of bronchitis. Larry may have to pass on conducting the interview personally. Whether they’d find a substitute host or just do something else was yet to be determined. She’d have to get back to me.
Talk about unfortunate.
We had come so far. . . .
That’s when an amazing thing happened. Evidently, the producer shared with Larry King the incredible effort that the Schindlers had made to get there to tell their story. Larry King, clearly impressed by Bob and Mary’s depth of conviction, decided to leave the hospital and do the interview personally that night.
Although not feeling well, Larry was gracious, focused, and caring. His professionalism and interest allowed the Schindlers to effectively take their case to the world. At the end of the interview, Larry said, ‘‘Thank you very much for coming, for flying here across the country, out of hurricaneville in Florida and for making the presentation you made tonight. It’s been extraordinary.’’4 Those weren’t empty words. Privately, he extended his best wishes to the Schindlers for taking a stand for Terri. He shared that this case caused his family and him to discuss these issues on a personal level. Like many Americans were asking at this time, Larry asked why they just couldn’t let the parents take care of their daughter.
Needless to say, Bob and Mary were wondering the exact same thing.