SACRAMENTO -- In a highly anticipated ruling in the right-to-die case of Robert Wendland, the California Supreme Court unanimously sided with the mother of the man who spent years on life support.

Wendland's mother, Florence Wendland, who was at his side when he died July 17 in a Lodi hospital, wanted her son to live as long as possible.

Wendland was kept alive by a feeding tube for eight years following a 1993 car accident that left him severely brain damaged.

But wife Rose Wendland fought to have the feeding tube removed and end what she considered to be his suffering.

The justices, ruling 6-0, noted that the husband was not hospitalized in a vegetative state but instead was conscious, albeit seesawing in a twilight state that provided him no means to care for himself.

"These two conversations do not establish by clear and convincing evidence that the conservatee would desire to have his life-sustaining treatment terminated under the circumstances in which he now finds himself," Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar wrote.

The court cautioned, however, that it was not setting a broad standard as to when conservators could pull the plug on conservatees.

Instead, its decision affects "only a narrow class of persons: conscious conservatees who have not left formal directions for health care and whose conservators propose to withhold life-sustaining treatment for the purpose of causing their conservatees' deaths."

The case began in 1995, when Rose Wendland thought she was carrying out her husband's wishes when she directed doctors to pull his feeding tubes, two years after an auto accident left him in a near-vegetative state.

But the woman's wishes were blocked and have been embroiled in the courts ever since, reigniting national debate over when loved ones can make such directives when no will or other written document verifies those wishes. An estimated 15 percent of U.S. adults have drafted such wills or designated such powers to others.