What makes you think these people were respected in the field for their opinions? I see no evidence of that in the article. They're just described as "men who already knew one another: ten doctors, one lawyer, one historian, and one theologian." To me that doesn't make them any more an expert than anyone else.

As for "access to the best literature on what is possible", who in this era of the internet doesn't have such access? Again, this is no indication that they're an expert.

Then you say that the above qualifications are "evidenced by the fact that the report they issued was not forced upon anyone. The 27 states that issued new definitions of death were not under some external pressure to adopt those definitions. If there was some deep controversy about the report, then it doesn't have to lead to anything. These experts were empowered to do precisely one thing--issue their opinion. That so many states adopted their opinion suggests that it was pretty good."

Legislators pass all sorts of stupid laws all the time, often without even reading them. I don't take the lack of "deep controversy about the report" (if there really was none) to be evidence of anything but just that. The reason for such a lack could be anything from lack of publicity to having hired a good PR agency, to having biased or ignorant legislators, etc.

Anyway, there's a section of the article in which even one of the "experts" admitted that he was being disengenous:

"The commission’s staff philosopher, Daniel Wikler, a professor at Harvard and the first staff ethicist for the World Health Organization, told me that he didn’t think the commission’s theory of death was supported by the scientific facts it cited. "I thought it was demonstrably untrue, but so what?" he said. "I didn’t see a downside at the time." Wikler told the commission that it would be more logical to say that death occurred when the cerebrum--the center for consciousness, thoughts, and feelings, the properties essential to having a personal identity--was destroyed. His formulation would have rendered a much broader population of patients, including those who could breathe on their own, dead.

"Despite Wikler’s reservations, he drafted the third chapter of the report, "Understanding the ‘Meaning’ of Death." "I was put in a tight spot, and I fudged," he told me. "I knew that there was an air of bad faith about it. I made it seem like there are a lot of profound unknowns and went in the direction of fuzziness, so that no one could say, ‘Hey, your philosopher says this is nonsense.’ That’s what I thought, but you’d never know from what I wrote."

You wrote:

"The medical community does this because they are in an emotionally compromised position. Because they have a relationship with the person their family, they might ignore what is medically possible or likely and attempt heroic measures that would lead to huge expenses and/or lead to an undesirable outcome."

Huge expenses? How much is a life worth?

And if the person is already dead, in the eyes of the doctors, what "undesirable outcome" could their measures have?