Lawyer shares lessons from Schiavo Web site
A St. Petersburg lawyer spoke to the Capital Tiger Bay Club about the worldwide reaction to his legal affairs site.
By LUCY MORGAN
Published April 29, 2005
TALLAHASSEE - Florida courts could learn a lesson from the Terri Schiavo case, says Matt Conigliaro, a St. Petersburg lawyer whose legal affairs Web site attracted international attention in recent months.
Speaking to the Capital Tiger Bay Club Friday, Conigliaro outlined his experiences with thousands of e-mails he received in the past two years in response to legal opinions and comments on the Schiavo case on his Web site, www.abstractappeal.com
Conigliaro did not take sides but merely posted court decisions and discussed the history of the law.
"I don't take a side, but I do support the legal rulings. I think the judges followed the law," he said.
He launched the Web site on a whim. "It started because I had nothing better to do with my nights," Conigliaro joked. "I started writing about the law and began to write more and more as the Schiavo case gained attention."
Before Schiavo died last month, Conigliaro had received some 5,000 e-mails from people around the world who logged on to his Web page or found information from it posted on various Internet bulletin boards.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned from the Schiavo case, Conigliaro said. Most people have focused on the need for a living will, but he suggested Floridians should go beyond merely drafting a document and talk with friends and family members about their living wills and explain how they want to be treated.
"We are left with a rather sad situation," he said. "There is still a great deal of misinformation out there. People believe her husband made the decision to pull the feeding tube. He didn't. A court made this decision."
There is also a lesson for courts in the Schiavo case, he said. They should do more to defend their decisions, making documents and rulings more available to the public.
"It's not something courts do," Conigliaro noted. "They depend on the side that won to make it sound right."
The Florida Supreme Court and many state courts have made many decisions available on the Internet, but more needs to be done, Conigliaro suggested.
His own Web site includes a chronological listing of all the Schiavo court decisions, newspaper stories and related issues.
At first Conigliaro said he didn't think anyone was reading his postings but as the Schiavo case gained national attention, he began to get e-mails from people who had found their way to the site on the same day he posted a new comment.
"I would say something in the morning and have e-mails from hundreds of people by afternoon," he said.