The autopsy results released yesterday should embarrass all the opportunistic politicians and agenda-driven agitators who meddled in Terri Schiavo's right-to-die case. There is no evidence that Ms. Schiavo's husband did any of the awful things attributed to him, and no hope that her greatly damaged brain would ever have recovered. The courts were right to conclude that she should be allowed to die after 15 years in what her doctors described as a persistent vegetative state with no hope of recovery.

The autopsy and a broader investigation conducted by medical examiners in Florida inevitably left some questions without definitive answers. That reflects the limitations of a pathological examination and the uncertainties of clinical medicine. But what the inquiry did reveal leaves little doubt that death was the merciful finale to this tragic case.

The medical examiners found Ms. Schiavo's brain "profoundly atrophied," only half the normal size, and said that "no amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons." Although the autopsy could not definitively establish that Ms. Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state, the findings were deemed "very consistent" with that diagnosis. She was completely blind and could not have swallowed food or water safely on her own. Those conclusions underscore how shallow and cynical were the judgments-from-afar by the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, who is a doctor, and by other Republicans in Congress who contended that Ms. Schiavo looked responsive and that her condition might be amenable to treatment.

The medical investigation disproved paranoid theories that Michael Schiavo had injured his wife, either at the time of the accident or while she lay in medical institutions all those years. The autopsy was unable to pinpoint what caused her collapse in 1990, but the inquiry found no evidence of neglect, abuse, strangulation or other trauma. Nor did it find that any poison, drugs or other substances had been administered to her to hasten her death.

The findings will not satisfy Ms. Schiavo's parents, who remain convinced that she interacted with them before her death and could have responded to treatment. The family's lawyer argued yesterday that Ms. Schiavo had not been facing imminent death when her feeding tube was withdrawn. That was true in the sense that she could have been kept alive with a feeding tube. But according to testimony from her husband that the courts found credible, such a life was not what she would have wanted.