only allows her parents to visit for one hour and make two twenty minute phone calls per week, and even those are monitored by hospital staff. Her older sister, Jennifer, claims that Justina says, "'psychiatric staff have told her she is never coming home.' They have apparently told her not to plan any homecoming parties because she isn't going home. I don't know exactly when or how many times she has been told this but Justina believes she is going to die in there."

In the ten months since she was admitted to Boston Children's Hospital, Justina's condition has deteriorated to the point where her family says she no longer walks on her own and is now bound to a wheelchair. Her sister, Jennifer, says, "I don't know whatStuart Mill said in the middle of the 19th century in On Liberty. The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual's own good."

This Friday, December 20, Judge Joseph Johnston delivered a shocking blow to the Pelletiers, declaring that the state had met its burden for maintaining custody of Justina, and she will remain in their "protective" care indefinitely until the government rules otherwise. Justina will not be home for Christmas, as her parents had desperately hoped. She may not be coming home for a long time.

Emotions were high, and the judge's decision prompted angry outbursts of "Evil!" in the courtroom, according to the Boston Globe.

"I don't understand