BreakPoint | Life or Death in Florida

While a California businessman prepares to offer Michael Schiavo a million-dollar remittance, Chuck Colson urges people to contact their Senators and Representatives to support the new Incapacitated Persons Legal Protection Act. Under that Act, Terri Schindler-Schiavo would get a federal hearing and be entitled to her own lawyer.

Time is running out for Terri, as you know--because Judge Greer has ordered her feeding tube removed by 1:00 p.m. seven days from now (March 18). But if this law passes, that will change the nature of the game--and then time will be running out for Michael, not Terri.

Right now, Michael has until 4 p.m. Monday (March 14) to take the remittance or leave it. A remittance, as I'm sure you know, is money someone pays you to get lost. Robert Herring, the one who ponied up the remittance (and deposited it already in Gloria Allred's lawyer's trust account), has laid down very simple terms: Michael Schiavo waives his interest in Terri's legal and medical decisions, and Herring pays Schiavo the million dollars. If Michael Schiavo does not take the million, then he is either a blind, raging maniac or, as I have long suspected, guilty of attempted murder and afraid that she'll talk.

But if he passes up that offer, and the IPLPA passes, then he's in major-league trouble--for what do you suppose any Federal judge will think of the standard of care that Terri has had all these years? Add to it that Michael Schiavo has found another squeeze and sired two children on her, and his position becomes acutely embarrassing to say the least. And then maybe someone could persuade Mr. Herring to offer up that milliion dollars--as his all-inclusive fee to hire a private investigator to solve the mystery of Terri's so-called collapse once and for all. (Where is Joe Mannix, or Philip Marlowe, when you could sure use one of them?)