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as our office was drafting it. We made the final edits to our proposed legislation by the end of the weekend. At the crack of dawn on Monday, we rushed the document off to Representative Stargel just in time for it to be introduced a few hours later.
    It was not until the bill was already on its way to the legislature that we informed the Schindlers we were working on what we hoped would produce a breakthrough for Terri. We had told the Schindlers on Friday that we were working on something but that we were not at liberty to provide them with any details at that point. We just told them not to turn off their cell phones for the next few days and that we would definitely need to be able to reach them on Monday.
    You see, we were keeping our project very quiet because we didn’t want the other side to learn of the pending legislation and, in turn, possibly build a strategy against it. But by Monday we felt we could finally encourage Bob and Mary not to give up—and to pray for the miracle legislation that just might still save their daughter’s life.
    ROAD BLOCKS, DETOURS, AND ALLIES
    Our hopes ran high as we worked that weekend, but we hit a snag on Monday. We received a troubling phone call informing us that we’d hit a brick wall in the legislature. A powerful state senator had made it known emphatically that, whatever the house did, he intended to per- sonally block the bill from coming to the senate floor for a vote. We later learned why this noble effort had reached an impasse.
    As it turned out, this powerful senator had been the chief architect of the 1997 Florida end-of-life legislation that had helped Michael’s attorney George Felos get Michael into Judge Greer’s courtroom. Therefore, the senator was opposed to any alteration to the law that he and several others had personally crafted for just this sort of situation.
    Keep in mind that Terri seemed to be the ‘‘test case’’ for this new law.
    As far as we were aware, George Felos used it for the first time at the 2000 trial to allow the court to condemn Terri to death.
    It was this legislation, along with new interpretations of Florida’s constitutional provisions regarding privacy rights, that now made it possible for a Florida court to determine that a disabled person without a living will, and who was ‘‘terminal’’ or in a ‘‘persistent vegetative state,’’ could be ordered to die by a judge after a determination of that person’s end-of-life wishes was made. The court could now hear oral testimony regarding whether that person would want to live or die in that circumstance.
    All the court had to do was to determine whether there was clear and convincing evidence of the disabled person’s wishes, and if the court found such evidence, a civil death sentence could be imposed.
    Under this new law, artificial life support now had a radically expanded definition and included the use of a feeding tube. Of course, removal of the tube for Terri would result in dehydration and starvation.
    The senator who was opposing our proposed bill considered his earlier legislation to be a legacy to a family member whose dying was prolonged because there was no living will or other document that would have permitted doctors to unplug life support, food, and water. He wasn’t about to let anybody tamper with his legacy.
    Our law firm’s original draft of what eventually became known as Terri’s Law was intended to reverse the relatively new Florida public policy that permitted the unplugging of feeding tubes for people like Terri who had no written end-of-life directives. Our bill would have protected the disabled from having a feeding tube removed when there was a family disagreement regarding the disabled person’s spoken end-of-life wishes. No wonder the senator was unwilling to agree to this change.
    When we realized that the bill was going to be kept off the senate floor, a