Bush v. Schiavo · 885 So. 2d 321 (Fla. 2004) · No. SC2004-0925 · Decided September 23, 2004
In the fall of 2003, the Florida Legislature passed a law written for one woman. The Florida Supreme Court held that even a legislature has no power to reach into a case already decided and overturn it.
The Facts
Theresa Marie Schiavo collapsed in the hallway of her St. Petersburg apartment on February 25, 1990. She was twenty-six. Cardiac arrest cut off oxygen to her brain long enough to leave her in what her doctors called a persistent vegetative state — alive, but by every clinical measure, gone. She would not wake up again.
For eight years, her husband, Michael Schiavo, and her parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, shared the burden of her care. Then, in 1998, Michael petitioned the Pinellas County guardianship court to remove the feeding tube keeping her body alive, testifying that Terri had told him, before her collapse, that she would never want to be kept alive by artificial means. The Schindlers disputed it, and what followed became one of the longest-running guardianship disputes in Florida history — years of hearings and five trips through the appellate courts, ending with a trial judge, George Greer, finding by clear and convincing evidence that removing the tube was what Terri herself would have chosen.
On October 15, 2003, the tube came out. Six days later, in an extraordinary one-day special session, the Florida Legislature passed a law that had never existed before and would never exist again: a statute written to apply to a single, identified patient, in a single, already-decided case. Governor Jeb Bush signed it within hours and used it that same day to order the tube reinserted.
What Each Side Argued
For the Governor
The Governor’s lawyers argued that the law protected a narrow, sympathetic class of patients — those left incapacitated with no written advance directive, and a family in genuine dispute over their wishes — and that the Legislature was entitled to act where existing guardianship law had, in its view, produced an irreversible result on contested evidence. They framed Terri’s Law as a targeted safeguard, not an assault on the courts.
For the Guardian
Michael Schiavo’s lawyers, joined by the ACLU of Florida as amicus, argued something more structural: that a legislature cannot pass a law whose only real purpose is to reopen and reverse one final judgment already entered against one named party. That, they said, is not lawmaking — it is the Legislature sitting as a court of last resort over a single case, which the separation of powers does not allow.
What the Court Held
On September 23, 2004, the Florida Supreme Court agreed with Michael Schiavo — unanimously. Writing per curiam, the Court found the separation-of-powers question dispositive and did not reach the privacy and retroactivity grounds the circuit court had also relied on. The reasoning was narrow but absolute: once a court’s judgment in an individual’s case becomes final, no other branch of government — not the Legislature, not the Governor — has the constitutional authority to reopen it.
The Second District Court of Appeal had already certified the case as one of great public importance requiring immediate resolution. The Supreme Court agreed, and struck the statute down in its entirety as facially unconstitutional.
The Aftermath
The U.S. Supreme Court denied review. Congress, in an almost unprecedented Sunday session in March 2005, passed a private bill giving Terri’s parents a new avenue into federal court; reviewing the case on an emergency basis, the federal courts declined to disturb what Florida’s courts had already decided. On March 18, 2005, the feeding tube was removed for the final time. Terri Schiavo died on March 31, 2005 — fifteen years after she collapsed.
The case outlived her. Bush v. Schiavo is taught today less for what happened to Terri Schiavo than for what it said about the limits of legislative and executive power over a finished judgment — and in the years since, it has become one of the most cited reasons Americans give for finally writing down their own wishes in an advance directive.
| Court | Supreme Court of Florida |
| Citation | 885 So. 2d 321 (Fla. 2004) |
| Case No. | SC2004-0925 |
| Lower Court | 2nd DCA — 2D04-2045 |
| Decided | September 23, 2004 |
| Vote | Unanimous, per curiam |
Primary sources: Opinion available. Initial Brief, Answer Brief, and Record on Appeal — access pending. This archive does not publish secondhand summaries.