Terri Gets Her Toe Tag

Well, the autopsy results of Terri Schiavo have been released, and shockingly, they purport to find that she was in a "permanent vegetative state" but don't even venture an opinion as to how she ended up that way:

Although the meticulous postmortem examination could not determine the mental state of the Florida woman, who died March 31 after a judicial and legislative battle over her "right to die," it did establish the permanence of her physical condition.

Schiavo's brain damage "was irreversible . . . no amount of treatment or rehabilitation would have reversed" it, said Jon R. Thogmartin, the pathologist in Florida's sixth judicial district who performed the autopsy and announced his findings at a news conference in Largo, Florida.

Still unknown is what caused Schiavo, 41, to lose consciousness on a winter morning in 1990. Her heart beat ineffectively for nearly an hour, depriving her brain of blood flow and oxygen.

A study of her organs, fluids, bones and cells, as well as voluminous medical records, failed to support strangulation, beatings, a drug overdose, complications of an eating disorder or a rare molecular heart defect. All had been offered as theories over the past 15 years. Thogmartin said the cause will probably never be known.

In truth, Thogmartin's conclusion about the "irreversibility" of Terri's condition is little more than supposition. People with similar brain injuries have regained lucidity years after their injuries, oftentimes with abrupt suddenness. Medical science simply doesn't know enough about the human brain to be able to speak with such certitude. If Thogmartin was being intellectually honest, he'd have added "in my opinion." But then whether or not Terri's condition was reversible was irrelevant to the question of her court-ordered homocide.

What is awfully convenient for Michael Schiavo is how the report doesn't even attempt to speculate on the cause of her 1990 collapse, and sweeps away any and all "theories" that would reflect poorly on him. A result I'd have been more than willing to accept had Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, the well-known forensic pathologist and coroner of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, who had been asked by the Schindler family to observe - not participate in, but just observe - the autopsy proceedings, been allowed to do so. Surely if the Three Horsemen (Michael Schiavo, his attorney George Felos, and Judge George Greer) had nothing to hide, one would think they'd have welcomed such observation, if only in a "clearing the air" sense.

But no. Dr. Wecht was barred, so we really have no way of knowing whether Dr. Thogmartin's results are on the level, or were "sanitized" either during the autopsy or after the fact.

Instead, we're left with a murdered woman and a "mystery."

Maybe this report is totally legit. But it sounds like the culmination of the perfect crime to me.

Any on the other side who don't like that speculation only have Dr. Thogmartin, and ultimately the Pale Riders, to blame.

[via Captain's Quarters]