USATODAY.com - Schiavo turns down $1M offer

That's right: Michael Schiavo has practically spit upon Robert Herring's offered remittance. His attorney, George Felos, called the remittance offer "offensive"--no surprise there, because George Felos lives to see euthanasia performed as a matter of routine, almost after the fashion described in Nolan and Johnson's sci-fi chiller Logan's Run. Mr. Herring says that the offer is still on the table, and his earlier deadline of 4:00 p.m. Monday still stands. (We can't, in all fairness, expect Michael Schiavo to comment directly. No litigant, having already retained an attorney, ever talks to anyone--unless he's Michael Jackson, which Schiavo is not.)

All eyes now turn to Congress, where "Terri's Federal Bill" (my name for the Incapacitated Persons Legal Protection Act) is her last hope.

A number of correspondents, and others in non-cyberspace with whom I have spoken about this case, have asked me to consider whether Michael Schiavo might in fact be correctly representing his wife's end-of-life wishes. In answer, I say that his behavior and demeanor since her collapse are not those of a loving husband. One does not call one's loved one by the common name given to a female dog (which epithet is an insult to dogs, but I digress) and ask only whether she is dead yet. Add to it that he has a mistress, has evidently had one since before Terri's collapse, and stands to gain financially from her death (though maybe not as much as a million dollars or the reported ten million dollars that someone else is supposed to have offered as a remittance), and he clearly has a conflict of interest and cannot therefore speak as the only witness to Terri's wishes and desires.

Since he will not take the remittance, one might suppose that he really does have the carrying-out of her wishes at heart. But in this case I have heard hints of spousal abuse, and I have seen clear and convincing evidence of the disallowance of routine medical and dental care. And that is why I suspect that he put her in the state she's in, and doesn't want her to talk, either with her natural voice or with her fingers on a computer keyboard, and perhaps accuse him of attempted murder.

Against this, Robert and Mary Schindler's failure to hire a private investigator and task him with solving the mystery of her death strikes me as negligent in the extreme. If someone did offer Michael Schiavo a ten million dollar remittance--ten times as much as Robert Herring is now offering--then why did that someone not use that spurned remittance to hire the private investigator right then?

We now have to consider, frankly, whether Terri Schindler-Schiavo is what we would call a "saved" person, and whether, as a result, she would indeed pass on to a better place if the latest court order were carried out. On that point, sadly, I have no evidence.