2 posts tagged “court”

At least the British don’t pull out feeding tubes.
   In November 2007, it was reported that a 23-year-old woman, Amy Pickard, who had gone into a coma after a drug overdose (sounds familiar?) woke up thanks to the use of a sleeping pill. The pill, Zolpidem, has various side effects for comatose patients. Ms Pickard has even managed to stand.
   This link comes from the Life for Lauren website and I hope that the courts recognize this, along with the testimony of Kate Adamson, who was once diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state. Today, Ms Adamson goes around the US as a motivational speaker.
   Ms Adamson, whom some of you may remember appearing on the news around the time of the Terri Schiavo case, was paralysed from the forehead down. She was operated on with insufficient anæsthetic and surgeons did not care, because they deemed her a vegetable and unable to feel. She felt everything they did.
   She was also starved for eight days after her feeding tube was taken out and recalls it was one of the most painful and inhumane experiences a person can have.
   It was only put back in because her husband, a lawyer who had given up his practice to care for her, threatened to sue everyone’s pants off.
   Her left side is not fully able but Ms Adamson is arguably more productive than many of us with what society deems healthy bodies.
   Lauren Richardson is in a better state than Kate Adamson was, able to respond to her father and her dog, according to a video that has since been removed from YouTube. Yet the courts are so far supporting her mother, who believes her daughter’s feeding tube should be removed.
   Edith Towers, Richardson’s mother, says her daughter told her and another relative that she would not want to live this way, after watching the Terri Schiavo case on television.
   Although this evidence is hearsay—and weak at that—the court in Delaware is giving Towers considerable authority over Richardson’s rights. Her father is fighting that judgement.
   This blog also revealed in comments, which I repeat to save readers from searching, additional facts:

You can go to Lauren’s MySpace page and look to see where she states herself that she got along better with her father then with her mother. However, the verdict was based solely on her mother and her mother’s uncle stating that she had said she did not want to live “like that”.
   Not to mention, if Lauren did say those things in 2005 as told in court, she was on drugs and drinking when [she] made them, and she was not a mother. At the same time she allegedly made these statements one of the two witnesses had just gotten out of a mental institution and one was on drugs himself. These do not seem like they should be admissible to me.
   The week that Lauren “accidentally” overdosed, she had been hiding from her mother who was trying to force her to have an abortion. She had been clean for ten months! Her stuff was packed because that weekend she was going to move in with her dad, because she had asked him to help her with the baby.
   Several doctors have requested to see Lauren and try different treatments. Her mother has refused all of them. Her doctor, who is not a neurologist, told the family that she would not wake up, she would not move her body, that she would not respond to pain, that she would not breathe on her own again, that would not respond to people, that she would not show emotion. She does all of these things. She also can swallow and doctors have said with enough therapy she could eat on her own again. If she had gotten that therapy and could feed herself would we then hold her arms down so she cannot eat?

   Towers has even prevented Richardson from seeing her own daughter, to whom she gave birth last year. What sort of mother is that?
   I would have thought news like Amy Pickard’s would be celebrated. There is so much out there that says that Lauren Richardson is less “vegetative” than these other folks—who got out of far worse states than she finds herself in now.
   The courts do listen to “experts” but they also need to look at the strength of the testimony and subject it to the same rules as they might in criminal cases. We are talking about a human life here, and we can’t kill someone based on hearsay.

Just to show how distraught he is at having the wrong trousers which necessitated him to sue a hard-working Korean couple for $54 million, Judge Roy Pearson burst into tears in court today.
   Ah, so he’s not just a vindictive prick: I happen to share the Chungs’ attorney’s viewpoint here.
   My opinion: what a goddamn phoney. It’s not like the trousers were being controlled by an evil penguin or rooster or something.
   I hope that all dry-cleaners in the Chungs’ region have little signs of Judge Pearson in their shops with, ‘Do not serve this vindictive bastard’.
   The Judge may find, to his surprise, that signs in consumer law are to be interpreted through the eyes of the reasonable person, not unreasonable, over-the-top, over-the-hill, overreacting morons, and that the quantum of damages is likely limited by that.
   Not everyone is as vindictive as he is, certainly not his colleagues on the bench who will feel this man has made a mockery of everything the US justice system is meant to stand for.