Could this be the rift that starts the civil war?

[sosuemetoo]

Re: Could this be the rift that starts the civil war?

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"CaryP\")</div>

Sosue,

My dear friend. You ain't been paying attention. Terri Shiavo had the Last Rites and Communion just before the feeding tube was pulled. By court order she's supposed to be able to receive Communion again before she dies. Yeah, I was raised Catholic, but I'm recovering.[/b]

Okay, I wasn't aware she had already been given Last Rites when they pulled the feeding tube. I was asking the question, wondering if Michael would deny her Last Rites as well.

I did think it was cruel not to allow her communion on the most sacred holiday on the christian calendar. Especially from such a devout Catholic, as he claims to be.

 

[Timmy G]

Re: Could this be the rift that starts the civil war?

Bush just needs to declare Terri an enemy combatant, then she can be kept alive indefinatly.

Darkwolf, I really didn't want to waste a post chuckling at your wit - but I am...

LMAO

 

[CaryP]

Re: Could this be the rift that starts the civil war?

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"Anders\")</div>

Cary, isn't everyone going over their will and/or living will to make appropriate adjustments? My code words are Bullwinkle for \"let me live\" and Boris for \"pull the plug\", I think because Bullwinkle is mostly glottal consonants that are easy to articulate even when incapacitated and Boris is slightly harder to articulate.[/b]

Anders,

I'm not a lawyer, so I don't write wills or other legal documents. None of my clients are particularly concerned about this kind of situation happening to them as far as I know. I haven't heard one comment. At the same time, most of my clients already have wills, living wills, trusts, etc. because I recommended them when our "relationship" was established. I recommend they use attorneys who specialize in estate planning, especially if they have a sizable estate. It's a fairly complex area of the law, and I've seen some wills written by attorneys that don't even make good toilet paper.

It's pretty easy to make the case for having these legal documents, "cause you never know." And yes, I've heard of people rushing out to get living wills. Most hospitals have them, and they are typically a one page document. The Shiavo case is a great example of what can happen without proper estate planning.

Love the Bullwinkle/Boris code system. I hope you never have to use it.

Sosue,

If I heard the news story correctly, the reason that Michael Shiavo didn't allow the communion on Easter Day was because of the details of the court order. The court order said she was to have Communion a second time before she died, but stipulated that the hospital priest would have to administer the sacrement and/or be present along with her regular priest. Again, if I heard the news story correctly, Terri's parents only had the regular priest with them when they wanted her to receive Communion. Not trying to take sides here, just clarifying the news I heard.

Cary

 

[Zoomerz]

Re: Could this be the rift that starts the civil war?

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"thenumbersix\")</div>

I'm not particularly religious but as it's going in that direction this seems apt :

6th Commandment

..[/b]

Not applicable....We're talking here about the "Right to die", not killing....

Z-

 

[Darkwolf]

Re: Could this be the rift that starts the civil war?

I'm placing this here beacause it is another case of the exectutive branch and the judicial coming into conflict. It also shows that Bush's anti international stance is horse hockey.




Pikamax</span><a href=\'http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1372717/posts\' target=\'_blank\'>


Bush Decision to Comply With World Court Complicates Case of Mexican on Death Row By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, March 28 - At first glance, the Bush administration\'s decision to comply with an international tribunal\'s order for new hearings for 51 Mexican nationals on death row might have appeared to resolve, or at least simplify, a pending Supreme Court case.

After all, new hearings are what the Mexicans are seeking in an appeal brought by one of them, a Texas death row inmate named Jose Ernesto Medellin. The Mexicans, inmates on the death rows of Texas and four other states, are arguing that their rights were violated when they were tried and convicted without the notice to their government that an international treaty requires.

But in arguments on Monday, it was apparent that the administration\'s new position has complicated rather than simplified the case, which now appears far from resolution. It also seemed that any resolution, at least for this phase of the case, was not to come from the justices, who appeared to be looking for ways to remove the appeal from their docket without deciding it.

The legal question the Supreme Court had originally agreed to decide was whether a federal appeals court had properly refused to consider Mr. Medellin\'s effort to invoke the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations to challenge his 1994 murder conviction and death sentence.

In refusing last year to accept Mr. Medellin\'s petition for a writ of habeas corpus, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, had relied on a 1998 Supreme Court precedent in a similar case, involving a Paraguayan national, to conclude that any rights under the Vienna Convention gave way to procedural barriers that Congress has established to limit state prison inmates\' access to federal courts.

But between the Supreme Court\'s 1998 ruling and the Fifth Circuit\'s ruling last May, the legal landscape for inmates in Mr. Medellin\'s position changed. In March 2004, the International Court of Justice in the Hague, also known as the World Court, ruled in a lawsuit brought by Mexico against the United States that the Vienna Convention gave to 51 Mexicans who had not been informed at the time of their arrests that they could seek assistance from Mexican consular officials the right to \\"review and reconsideration\\" of their convictions and sentences.

Although the World Court\'s judgment ordered the United States to provide an \\"effective review\\" of each case, the Fifth Circuit concluded that the decision did not help Mr. Medellin. The Vienna Convention dealt with relations between governments and did not create an \\"individually enforceable right\\" on the part of criminal defendants, the appeals court held. It also said that Mr. Medellin\'s failure to raise the Vienna Convention issue at his trial meant that the ordinary rules of \\"procedural default\\" barred him from receiving any benefit from the World Court\'s ruling.

The Fifth Circuit\'s ruling was correct, the Bush administration informed the Supreme Court when it filed its brief earlier this month in the case, Medellin v. Dretke, No. 04-5928. But the brief added an unexpected wrinkle: an announcement that President Bush would comply with the World Court\'s decision, as an exercise of his \\"constitutionally based foreign affairs power,\\" by directing the state courts to give the new hearings that the ruling required.

In arguments on Monday, Donald F. Donovan, representing Mr. Medellin, said the Supreme Court should retain jurisdiction over the case but should not decide it at this point, instead allowing the Texas courts to proceed.

\\"The president is giving effect to commitments made by the United States,\\" and the court should defer to the administration\'s decision, Mr. Donovan said.

But some justices appeared to find that option unattractive. \\"Granting a stay could be seen as validating the position of the government without ever having written an opinion on it,\\" Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist told Mr. Donovan. Based on the justices\' responses, a more likely path would be to simply dismiss the case, which would have the same effect as if the court had never agreed to decide it in the first place.

R. Ted Cruz, the Texas solicitor general, urged the justices to decide the case by affirming the ruling of the Fifth Circuit and to leave other questions, including the individual rights of the defendant to assert claims under the treaty, to the Texas courts.

\\"This court should not, need not, address the many interesting questions of international law swirling around this case,\\" Mr. Cruz said.

\\"They really are interesting,\\" Justice Antonin Scalia agreed.

\\"They will launch a million law review articles,\\" Mr. Cruz said.

Mr. Cruz resisted providing a direct answer to Justice David H. Souter\'s question on whether the Texas courts would accept the president\'s determination that they should provide a new review to a case they had already rejected.

\\"There are significant constitutional problems with a unilateral executive determination displacing state criminal law,\\" Mr. Cruz said.

Michael R. Dreeben, a deputy United States solicitor general, said the Supreme Court would not need to resolve the \\"very sensitive and delicate questions\\" in the case if the Texas courts would accept the president\'s position and handle the case themselves. He said the president had decided that enforcing the World Court\'s judgment was \\"warranted as a matter of U.S. foreign policy\\" and that there would be \\"extraordinarily broad and detrimental foreign policy consequences\\" if the Mexican defendants did not get their hearings in state court. Chief Justice Rehnquist was on the bench on Monday despite a problem with his tracheotomy tube that sent him to the hospital over the weekend. The court\'s public information office said that the chief justice had developed an unspecified problem and was taken in an ambulance to the Virginia Hospital Center, near his home in suburban Virginia, where he was treated on an outpatient basis. The chief justice, who is being treated for thyroid cancer and must speak through his tube, sounded huskier on Monday than he had week, but appeared in good spirits.last


[/b][/quote] [/b]</span></a>

 

[Judge Bean]

Re: Could this be the rift that starts the civil war?

As with his mealymouthed "guestworker" summit with Fox, occurring simultaneously with the buildup of 2,300 federal agents along the "Tucson Corridor," Bush is completely hypocritical on the issue of international law. He has shown that he will take oldfashioned populist "America First" positions when he thinks it will get the votes of people who are frustrated with foreign animosity, but join in what they call the International Community when he needs to satisfy the big criminal corporations who operate outside the reach of our tax and environment laws.

 

[Zoomerz]

Re: Could this be the rift that starts the civil war?

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"Paul J. Lyon\")</div>

As with his mealymouthed \"guestworker\" summit with Fox, occurring simultaneously with the buildup of 2,300 federal agents along the \"Tucson Corridor,\" Bush is completely hypocritical on the issue of international law. ?He has shown that he will take oldfashioned populist \"America First\" positions when he thinks it will get the votes of people who are frustrated with foreign animosity, but join in what they call the International Community when he needs to satisfy the big criminal corporations who operate outside the reach of our tax and environment laws.[/b]

Weren't we just defending his judgement in not honoring the WC on this? Now he does a complete flipflop and why? Sounds like oil again to me. So does the border situation. No wonder the left calls him a fundamentalist conservative, and the right calls him a bleading heart liberal. I call him an opportunist. Slimy....

Z-

 

[sosuemetoo]

Re: Could this be the rift that starts the civil war?

Just announced a few minutes ago... Terri has died. May she rest in peace.

 

[StarLord]

Re: Could this be the rift that starts the civil war?

It a shame that all this attention and money has been wasted on what should have been a private matter between a husband and wife. When are we going to learn?

A few thousand children could have been fed on the money that was wasted on this.

 

[Timmy G]

Re: Could this be the rift that starts the civil war?

Anyone else find the politicizing of the Schiavo case by the Bush administration to be strangely surreal and almost seem like a warning sign from Bush that stricter law enforcement is to follow? Maybe I'm crazy..

As far as thread management goes, this thread was started regarding the Schaivo case. May she RIP. This one may remain open for a few days to see if any stimulating conversation remains... otherwise look for it to close soon thereafter.

StarLord, I agree completely. It's amazing at the resources simply being wasted on trivial things... makes me wanna hurl. How sad it is that most ppl (mainly media and those who buy said media) want things like the Shiavo case - so they can point fingers and say what is right and wrong; they want a piece of the pie ~ that is, until it is them that is being served.