JJB Blog

This article on kuro5hin provides an excellent overview of the case and responds to each argument posed by the neo-conservatives. Some excerpts:

Tom DeLay stooped to an all-time low calling Florida Judge Greer a “murderer and terrorist”…

In 1996 a CAT scan showed, according to 2nd District Federal Court ruling, “severely abnormal structure” and that her cerebral cortex is “simply gone and replaced with spinal fluid”. EEGs were flatline.

…in a transcript of one of Frist’s speeches to the Senate floor on March 17th, Frist reveals his ignorance of PVS: “I mentioned that terry’s brother told me that terry laughs, smiles, and tries to speak. Doesn’t sound like a woman in persistent vegetative state.”

In truth, patients in a PVS do show such symptoms: “Patients in VS can demonstrate behaviours that are associated in non-brain injured individuals with emotional experience, such as crying, grimacing, smiling, or laughing (Royal College of Physicians, 2003). When the patient fulfils diagnostic criteria for VS, these behaviours must reflect subcortical functions and are not indicative of subjective distress. Not surprisingly, this can be difficult for relatives to understand, and many families reasonably perceive these behaviours as signs that the patient is intentionally trying to ‘wake up’ (Jacobs et al., 1986).”

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