Episode
Frontline: Let My Daughter Die
Overview
Joe and Joyce Cruzan want doctors to remove their severely brain damaged daughter from the life-support system that keeps her alive. Nearly two years before it became the US Supreme Court’s first right-to-die case, Frontline explored the complex legal and moral issues of this Missouri couple’s battle to allow their daughter to die.
Details
- Series
- Frontline
- Season
- Season 6
- Episode
- Episode 11
- Air date
- 1988-03-01
Episode context
Let My Daughter Die is Episode 11 in Season 6 of Frontline. It aired on 1988-03-01.
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Episode 10: Shakedown in Santa Fe
Eight years after one of the most violent prison uprisings in US history, Frontline returns to the penitentiary in New Mexico to probe the contininuing struggle between the inmates and the guards, the wardens and the reformers, for control of one of our most dangerous prisons.
Episode 12: Back in the USSR
In 1968, American journalist Jerry Schecter, accompanied by his wife and five young children, moved to Moscow on assignment for Time magazine. In 1987, Frontline returned with the Schecter family to the Soviet Union as they renewed old friendships and explored Russia under glasnost.
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Episode 13: Poison and the Pentagon
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Episode 8: The Man Who Shot John Lennon
Frontline goes inside the mind of Mark David Chapman, the man who shot and killed John Lennon in 1980. Newly acquired records paint the chilling portrait of a celebrity stalker who meticulously planned the murder, believing it would make him famous.
Episode 14: To a Safer Place
When Shirley Turcotte was a child, she was sexually abused by her father. After years of therapy she takes a remarkable journey back into her past-confronting her mother and other adults who failed to protect her, reuniting with her brothers and sister who were also brutally abused, and trying to make peace with the horror story that was her childhood.
Episode 7: Operation Urgent Fury
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh investigates one of Ronald Reagan’s greatest truimphs-the rescue of American students during the 1983 invasion of Grenada. Hersh’s reporting reveals an inept US military operation and questions whether the students needed rescuing at all.
Episode 15: Murder on the Rio San Juan
Frontline investigates the unsolved 1984 terrorist bombing at a press conference held by contra leader Eden Pastora. Eight people, including an American reporter, died that night on the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. This report dissects the motives of possible conspirators and follows the trail of the man suspected of planting the bomb.
Episode 6: Praise the Lord
Frontline traces the rise and fall of television evangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker and investigates why government agencies failed to vigorously investigate charges of corruption in the Bakker empire.
Episode 16: American Game, Japanese Rules
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Episode 5: Apartheid Part 5: 1987
Part 5 looks at an unprecedented meeting in the struggle for South Africa’s future. Two years before the release of Nelson Mandela, dissident white Afrikaners met with black leaders from the outlawed African National Congress in Dakar, Senagal, to discuss strategies for change in South Africa, presaging the reforms that would come later.
Episode 17: Racism 101
Frontline explores the disturbing increase in racial incidents and violence on America’s college campuses. The attitudes of black and white students reveal increasing tensions at some of the country’s best universities where years after the civil rights struggle, full integration is still only a dream.