A federal jury in Chicago found Monday that leading anti-abortion activists conspired to use violence or threats of violence to prevent women from using abortion clinics–a huge court victory for abortion rights advocates who battled their opponents through court for more than a decade.
“It’s a victory for all women across the country,” Karen Johnson, vice president of the National Organization for Women, one of the plaintiffs.
But Thomas Brejcha, attorney for anti-abortion activists, said the verdict in the class-action suit meant open season on any group– such as Greenpeace or animal rights activists–that uses civil disobedience in pursuit of a political agenda. And some activists said they feared the verdict could affect protests over hotly contested issues around the country.
NOW attorneys maintained that Joseph Scheidler, of the Pro-Life Action League, and the other defendants were part of a structured group that carried out illegal activities over several years to terrorize women and abortion clinic workers. The plaintiffs used federal racketeering laws–the result of Congress’ Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act–to try to prove that the activists worked in concert to shut down the clinics and terrorize the women who used them.
The jury, which sat through a seven-week trial and then deliberated for three days, awarded $85,000 to the two abortion clinics–an amount that was based on the money they spent on security to combat the anti-abortion protests. U.S. District Judge David Coar can triple the damages, and he has scheduled a Tuesday hearing to deal with that, as well as an injunction sought by NOW barring protesters from blocking access to abortion clinics across the nation.
In addition to the damages, the law allows the plaintiffs to charge the defendants their attorneys’ fees, which Brejcha estimates will top $1 million.
However, Lowell Sachnoff and Fay Clayton, lawyers for the plaintiffs, said they don’t hold out much hope of collecting all the damages or fees from the defendants. Sachnoff, who represented the clinics, and Clayton, who represented NOW, are married.
Brejcha also said, “There is no real prospect of recovery from these defendants,” describing the organizations as “thinly financed.”
Lawyers for the defendants said they would appeal, and Scheidler said he would find “a way around” any injunction.
“I’m going to be out there saving the babies, talking with women, converting the abortionists,” he said.
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The defendants in the trial included Scheidler; his Chicago-based organization the Pro-Life Action League; and two members, Andrew Scholberg and Timothy Murphy. The fifth defendant was another group, Operation Rescue. The case was tried in Chicago because most of the defendants are based here. The two named clinics are in Delaware and Wisconsin, though the class included 900 clinics across the country.
Just how violent the protests got was strongly contested in the trial. NOW produced testimony of women who said they were attacked during protests when the defendants were present. The defendants maintained they never participated in nor condoned acts of violence, but the complicated verdict form jurors were required to fill out did not require them to take a stand on whether the individual defendants committed particular acts of “violence.”
For the defendants to be held liable, the jurors had to find that people associated with the defendants’ cause committed “acts or threats involving extortion” or “acts or threats of physical violence”
Congress passed the racketeering act in 1970 to help prosecute organized crime. Criminal law sometimes had given mob kingpins an out if only underlings could be connected with a crime, but the act holds liable everyone involved in an enterprise. Even if a defendant did not commit the crime, he is liable if it can be proved he was a member of the enterprise and someone in the enterprise committed a crime.
The extortion in this case, NOW’s attorneys argued, meant using intimidation or threats of violence to get something–not necessarily money. In this case, Clayton and Sachnoff argued, the anti-abortion activists used threats of “violent” protests if the clinics did not do what the anti-abortion leaders wanted them to do: close down. “In our case, they weren’t coming for the bag of money–but to force us to close down by blockades or threats,” said Susan Hill, president of the National Women’s Health Organization. “For us, working in the clinics, it was racketeering–we could either close voluntarily or we could live through hell.
“I liken it to the corner grocery store owners who are told by thugs they can either pay the price (of protection) or have their knees broken and their stores torn up,” Hill said. “They deprived women by fear, force or violence of their constitutional right to enter a clinic and staffers of their constitutional right to work. That’s extortion.”
NOW’s attorneys said the verdict gives the green light to any abortion clinic in the country to seek compensation from these anti-abortion activists for increased security costs relating to their activism. This could lead to other trials in other cities, as clinics try to collect the money.
Another important aspect of the legal fight involves the quest for an injunction, which could affect not only the defendants but also other activists accused of working with them, according to Clayton.
Attorneys for the anti-abortion activists argued during the trial that any injunction against blockades of clinics would be redundant because of the 1994 Federal Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which was passed eight years into the suit and provides for prison terms for people who block access to women’s health clinics.
The act drastically reduced the number of abortion protests in which demonstrators locked arms or placed locks on clinic doors, partisans on both sides of the abortion debate agree.
Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, agreed that abortion clinic protests are on the decline.
“In some cities, this case might have outlived its original purpose because the protests have died down,” he said.
Clayton said that while the activists slowed their use of clinic blockades during the trial, groups associated with them still blockaded clinics within the past year, so an injunction would not be a waste.
“This is the end of a 12-year journey,” Clayton said. Originally filed in 1986, the suit was thrown out by a number of judges who agreed with the anti-abortion side and the law’s drafters that the federal law was designed to fight organized crime and required defendants to have a motive of economic gain.
But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 1994 that the statute did not explicitly require economic gain as a motive, and the suit was sent back to Coar’s court to proceed.
Both sides said Monday they expected today’s verdict.
“The trial did not go well,” Brejcha said. “Many witnesses and evidence we wanted to introduce we were not permitted to. The RICO statute is a monster. We expected the worst and we got it.”