Andy — I believe the 11th Circuit majority properly appled the relevant legal tests and standards of review. Judge Wilson’s only real arguments to the contrary relied upon the courts’ equitable authority — not the strongest ground given the malleability of equitable principles — and, as I noted before, no federal judge has yet to suggest that there is any merit whatsoever to the underlying federal claims.

We can agree that there was real judicial mischief in the Florida state courts. The problem is that not all state-level judicial mischief merits making a federal case out of it — even when a life is at stake. Indeed, that was part of the point of the habeas reforms that conservatives championed. It takes much more than judicial mischief to create a constitutional violation remediable in the federal courts. Again, this does not mean that Terri Schiavo should be killed (I’m not in Derb’s camp on this one), but that there may not be a valid federal claim.

Speaking of constitutional violations, Andy, I’m also still wondering how your claims from before are anything other than substantive due process arguments.