US appeals court rebuffs Schiavo parents

A US appeals court yesterday denied a request for a full bench hearing on a bid by the parents of brain-damaged Florida woman Terri Schiavo to have her feeding tube restored, a court official said.

The judges of the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta voted 10-to-two not to grant a full hearing, the official said.

The decision closed another legal avenue to the parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, who have fought their son-in-law for seven years in the courts to prolong their daughter's life.

The Schindlers had asked the full appeals court to overturn a three-judge panel's refusal overnight, by a two-to-one majority, to order a resumption of tube feeding that was halted under a state court order last Friday.

The parents' lawyers had argued in a written brief that a law passed by Congress over the weekend made clear a new federal trial was in order, and that the only way to permit that was by keeping Ms Schiavo alive.

"Although barbarically deprived of food and water now for six days, the status quo is that she still lives," they said.

Doctors say Ms Schiavo was likely to remain alive for one to two weeks after her feeding tube was removed.

Ms Schiavo, 41, suffered brain damage after cardiac arrest in 1990 and was left in a "persistent vegetative state". State courts have sided with her husband Michael Schiavo's view that she would not want to be kept alive in that condition.

Her parents say she responds to them and could recover, and their determination to keep her alive has galvanised the Christian right and anti-abortion activists, and won support from the Republican-led Congress and President George W. Bush.

The law raced through Congress sought to circumvent years of state court rulings and push the case into federal court for a new trial.

Its backers clearly assumed any federal judge given the case would first order feeding restored, but the federal appeals court's three-judge panel stressed in its ruling that the law did not spell that out.

Opinion polls show most Americans oppose the Congressional intervention, and critics have assailed it as an assault on federalism and civil rights, and as political meddling in a family dispute.

But the parents' reinvigorated legal maneuvers since Ms Schiavo's feeding tube was disconnected were parried by US District Court Judge James Whittemore on Tuesday, who ruled Ms Schiavo had not been denied due process in state courts.