The Karen Ann Quinlan case is where the right to life and the right to die got bound together, and I don't think they've ever gotten untangled.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
A lawyer I once knew told me of a strange case, a suffragette who had never married. After her death, he opened her trunk and discovered 50 wedding gowns.
The situation around Terri Schiavo was a deeply held conflict over what to do if someone isn't going to return to consciousness or competence. Who will decide? Even there, where we had settled legal rules, we still had disagreement. We're torn about these things.
Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.
Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.
She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it.
You can't reconcile being pro-life on abortion and pro-death on the death penalty.
I have this fringe theory that I've sort of stress-tested a little bit - the more polarising and popular a case is, the more likely an acquittal.
Both sides were supposed to release all their prisoners, those were unconditional. There was some prisoner release that took place but it's not been satisfactory.
I was the Jane Roe of Roe vs. Wade, but Jane Roe has been laid to rest.
Fidelity is the sister of justice.