A flat EEG is huge.
Not if the leads were not connected.
If Terri really had a flat EEG something was wrong with the EEG or the way it was done. My grandmother had two flat EEG's (the hospital would not rely on just one) after suffering a heart attack and being without oxygen for almost a half hour. Afterwards she never regained conciousness, opened her eyes only once but did not focus, had no arm or leg movement outside of spasms, relied totally on a respirator to breathe and other machines to maintain body functions. Terri appeared to be nothing like this.
Indeed. In this case, it proves unambiguously the incompetance or dishonesty of the person who performed it.
I've worked with some electronic medical diagnostic equipment (cardiographic, not EEG, but similar principles). If a patient is moving around, the results are absolutely unreliable. If one takes a sample over the course of 30 seconds and the patient sneezes, it may be possible to filter out the noise by telling the unit to ignore about 5 seconds (2 seconds before and 3 seconds after the sneeze) and analyze the other 25, but to attempt to filter out the movement artifacts by varying gain or filter settings would be preposterous.