Colby represented the family of Nancy Cruzan, a persistent vegetative-state patient, in a landmark 1990 case that helped to establish legal precedent for patient autonomy—a person’s right to make their own medical decisions; in Cruzan’s case, the right to remove a feeding tube. But Colby published Unplugged after the death of Terri Schiavo in 2005, a replay of the Cruzan case on media steroids. Schiavo had collapsed in her home in February 1990 after a cardiac arrest. Eight years later, after no signs of improvement, her husband, Michael, decided to remove her feeding tube. Her parents and siblings, all devout Catholics, disagreed and launched a media campaign to keep the tube. The courts ultimately sided with Michael, citing wishes Schiavo expressed before her hospitalization. Her youth and gender made her a media cause and compelled a transfixed public to protect her. They also compelled the Catholic Church, the second-largest operator of hospitals in the US, to clarify its position on feeding tubes.

I watched Schiavo’s long, publicized death from a chair by my father’s deathbed. As a journalist, I covered the Catholic Church’s anachronistic reaction, writing about the legal caveats and institutional powers that permitted Church hierarchy to assert its doctrine in American hospitals. Schiavo’s parents lost their case, but Terri’s legacy is still felt in the wards of Catholic hospitals where the decision to remove a feeding tube remains the prerogative of hospital administrators, not patients.

I asked myself where else a person could be fed against their wishes. The answer pointed me to prison, and to William Coleman.

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