March 24, 2005, 11:03 a.m.
What If They Called 9-1-1
Terri Schiavo and protecting the innocent.
by Jack Dunphy, LAPD, National Review Online Columnist
If Terri Schiavo were able, she would go to the nearest telephone,
dial 9-1-1, and tell the operator that people are trying to kill her.
Police officers would respond, and they would take whatever action was
necessary, up to and including laying down their own lives, to ensure
that no harm came to this innocent, defenseless woman. If the
perpetrators were identified, they would be arrested and prosecuted,
perhaps to receive very lengthy sentences in prison. She cannot make
that phone call, of course, but those who love her have made it for
her, crying out to any and all who might have the authority to stand
in the path of what now appears inevitable: the very public starvation
and death of Theresa Marie Schindler Schiavo.
How on earth can this be?
As I write this it is Thursday morning, and as things currently stand
Ms. Schiavo has been without food or water for nearly six days. She is
being starved so as to allow those who would hasten her death and
those who merely acquiesce to it the pretense that she will have died
of "natural causes." The physical manifestations of her deprivations
have become apparent to those attending to her, and in the media we
are now treated to speculation on how long she might live and what she
might be experiencing as she draws ever nearer to the end. In
Wednesday's Los Angeles Times, for example, there appeared a story
under the headline, "Ceasing Food and Fluid Can Be Painless."
Incredibly, the point of the story seemed to be that death by
starvation is an experience to be enjoyed, something we should all
look forward to. It is staggering that things have come to such a
pass.
The details of the case have been exhaustively reported here on NRO
and elsewhere, but Ms. Schiavo's fate can be traced through a nearly
impenetrable cloud of legal rulings, page upon page of citations and
references and footnotes, all of it laced with words like movant and
respondent and all the other esoteric terms that seem to flow so
freely from the lips and pens of lawyers and judges. It is this
specialized language that allows those employed in the law to imagine
themselves superior to the rest of us, the unwashed of the lower
orders, to whom such language is foreign. And it is this language that
the various lawyers and judges will hide behind when Terri Schiavo
dies, when all their writs and motions and petitions have flown from
office to office and courthouse to courthouse before floating down and
congealing into a massive pile of recyclable rubbish.
Earlier this week I discussed the Schiavo matter with two coworkers,
both of whom claimed to have been following the case in the news. Both
of these men were under the impression that Ms. Schiavo is brain dead,
and that she is surviving only with the help of some marvel of modern
medical machinery. Both these impressions are false, but they seem
nonetheless to be widely held. Ms. Schiavo breathes on her own, and
she is not dependent on machinery for any of her bodily functions. She
is, according to some doctors, capable of some level of cognition and
interaction with others. The only aspect of her care that might be
described as "artificial" is the feeding tube which her husband, with
the complicity of the Florida and federal courts, has had removed. It
is her husband's prerogative to do so, these courts have ruled, based
on what he claims she told him years ago. Mr. Schiavo's claims of
marital obligations might be more easily respected were he not
involved in a de facto marriage - complete with two children - to
another woman. Despite all this, the vast machinery of the judiciary
remains indifferent to the suffering of Terri Schiavo.
Brian Nichols, the man accused of murdering four people in Atlanta
earlier this month, will stand trial for those crimes sometime in the
next year or two. Unless something extraordinary is revealed during
his trial he very likely will be convicted and sentenced to death. If
at some point during the appeals process he sustains an injury similar
to that suffered by Terri Schiavo fifteen years ago, will our robed
masters twiddle their thumbs just as impassively as he is rolled to
the execution chamber? No, they will not. They will tell us that even
a convicted mass-murderer is deserving of all the protections the law
can provide, the protections now being denied to a helpless, innocent
woman.
By the time you read this Terri Schiavo may well be dead. Our
sophisticated betters lecture us that due process has run its course
and that this is what the law demands. If this is so, then Charles
Dickens was right: The law is a *****.
-- Jack Dunphy is an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department.
"Jack Dunphy" is the author's nom de cyber. The opinions expressed are
his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD
management.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Cordially,
Ken (NY)
email: http://www.geocities.com/bluesguy68/email.htm
"When is that ***** gonna die?"
-Michael Schiavo,husband of executed Terri
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