It looks like Terri’s saga will soon be drawing to a close, as her parents have now given up hope. There are, however, two points in this story that I feel need closer attention.

The first came to my attention from Licia Corbella of the Calgary Sun. Corbella notes:

Technically, [Michael Schiavo] is still married to the severely brain-injured Florida woman who is at the centre of a political, judicial, moral and public storm in the U.S., if not around the world.

And yet, Michael is currently living with another woman — his common-law wife and their child…

So which is it? Do we recognize common-law marriages or not?

Indeed, this is a worthy question. Michael Schiavo is legally married to both his ‘girlfriend’ and Terri Schiavo. Does this not make him legally a bigamist, which is currently a crime? Furthermore, if the state can pronounce a couple married by dint of their having lived together for a time, it also follows that they should pronounce them divorced if that arrangement ends - in which case, Michael would no longer be spouse to Terri and would no longer have a say in her care. Whichever way this is seen, there is a serious contradiction in the law.

The second point I wish to make is that from all I have read of this case, the only ‘evidence’ that Terri ever expressed a wish to be euthanised in her current circumstances was an off-hand and unwitnessed comment made after watching a movie. The court ruling in this case makes such off-hand comments now legally binding, in lieu of living wills. An unwitnessed and unnotarised statement has literally become a death warrant. Not only can I see a plethora of greedy and inhumane people volunteering such ‘information’ about their spouses in order to collect life insurance, but what sort of precedent has been set for criminal confessions, the waiving of rights, breach of contract, wills and inheritance, and so forth? If this does not actually create the possibility, does it not at least germinate the idea that, for example, a police officer might claim in court that a defendant waived his Miranda rights in an off-hand and unwitnessed verbal comment (that, I probably need not add, might be pure fiction)?

The legacy of the Schiavo case may be a legal situation as seen in the USSR and other tyrannical regimes, where citizens have a whole host of rights on paper that are never exercised in practice because the onus of proof is placed upon the defendant, not the prosecutor, as in the Schiavo case where Michael Schiavos total lack of evidence was deemed insufficient to stop him taking a life that others would have seen preserved, and it may furthermore undermine the presumption of innocence rather than of guilt. The legacy of Terri Schiavo stands to affect a great deal more than just euthanasia.