Supreme Court Backs Abortion Protesters

A victory of sorts for the anti-abortionists?
Back in 1986, the National Organization for Women (NOW) filed a class-action suit challenging tactics used by the Pro-Life Action Network to block women from entering abortion clinics. NOW’s legal strategy relied on civil provisions of the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which was used predominantly in criminal cases against organized crime. The lawsuit also relied on the Hobbs Act, a 55-year-old law banning extortion.

A federal judge issued a nationwide injunction against the anti-abortion protesters after a Chicago jury found in 1998 that demonstrators had engaged in a pattern of racketeering by interfering with clinic operations, menacing doctors, assaulting patients and damaging clinic property. But the Supreme Court voided the injunction in 2003, ruling that the extortion law could not be used against the protesters because they had not illegally “obtained property” from women seeking to enter clinics to receive abortions. However, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had kept the case alive despite the 2003 high court ruling.
In writing for the 8 – 0 decision, Justice Stephen Breyer said Congress did not intend to create “a freestanding physical violence offense” in the federal extortion law known as the Hobbs Act.
Instead, Breyer wrote, Congress chose to address violence outside abortion clinics in 1994 by passing the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which set parameters for such protests

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Regardless of how one feels about abortion, the NOW tactics to use the racketeering law, which was obviously intended for other purposes, to discourage protests is at best disingenuous.
Read it all.

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  • http://Array robert108

    Hatlady:  Or who dies.  But this thread is about using anti-racketeering laws to suppress "dissent".  If you want to use it against all dissenters, that would be even more wrong, but at least it wouldn’t be hypocritical.  How many abortions fit your example, btw?

  • 2Hotel9

    Jeebus! Think of all the disadvantaged minority and handicapped children that could have been housed,clothed,educated, and medically cared for with the MILLIONS of dollars pissed away since this case started. What a waste.

  • Hatlady

    Some of Y’all are so heartless.  And what exactly would you do…  Say you were diagnosed with breast cancer and are undergoing chemotheraphy, but your doctors failed to tell you that chemo reduces the effectiveness of the most common forms of contraceptive.  And now you are pregnant.  You are going to have to make one of the hardest decision known to mankind.  Do you save yourself and try again later for a baby if and when you battle your way back from cancer?  Or do you die trying to carry a baby to term?  Or does the chemotheraphy cause horrible complications and birth defects?  Which would you choose?  Would you want someone – like Uncle Sam – to choose for you?

    Clinic protesters don’t even know if the women they are attacking are actually entering the clinic for the purpose of an abortion.  These clinics often are the only choice for women who need prenatal and obstetric care.  Yet protesters throw blood, physically block entrance, and harass any woman who tries to enter the clinic. 

    Be for real.  We do not live in a perfect world.  The questions isn’t if abortion is right or wrong.  It is all about who gets to make the decision.

    Hatlady

  • robert108

    2h9: I used to agree with that, but lately, with the decrease in ad revenues all across the MSM, it smells more like partisan politics, with the MSM following the extreme imbalance in the political persuasion of the employees.

  • ellinas

    It is about time, for the SCOTUS to lift the ban on on a freedom of speech issue.

  • mcair

    Typical lefty tactics.  Use the law to silence your critics.

    Who woulda thought that people sticking their noses into others’ business would meet any opposition in the land of the free.

    Seriously – " Use the law to silence your critics." – is that the best argument you can summon for defending the cretins that attack women exercising their rights under the law?

  • 2Hotel9

    hatlady, chemo not only drives down the effectivness of the pill, it also drives down fertility, and among the dozen or so people I have known who went through it, sex drive too. This game of creating hypothetical instances to justifiy abortion is not helping your cause. Trying to use anti-organized crime laws to stop people from speaking their minds in public ain’t going to help either. You claim you don’t want uncle to decide about abortion, yet you don’t seem to oppose him paying for them. Can’t have it both ways, pick one.

  • robert108

    Surprise, surprise!

  • Bat One

    It has really been amazing to watch these last 6 years.  Republicans, who are historically a fractious bunch, have spread their tent even further and wider, gradually encompassing more and more of the middle of the political spectrum, yet holding together despite the ever widening array of political beliefs.  The Democrats meanwhile, have moved ever farther to the left fringe, abandoning the middle in favor of an increasingly strident and uncivilized ideology.  Were the Republican not so well organized, and so well disciplined when they need to be, they might still win, if only by default.

    Indeed, there is but one consensus issue that holds the remanents of what was once this nation’s majority party together: Roe v. Wade.  And now that too is slowing, inexorably, slipping away.  Make no mistake.  This was a unanimous decision. The emanations and penumbras are giving way to a new, or perhaps an older, and more reasoned view of our Constitution.

    And in the nearly three years remaining in his presidency, Mr. Bush may very well have at least one more SCOTUS appointment to make, not to mention more federal District and Appellate seats as well. 

  • robert108

    docdave: Convicting some protestors as racketeers while approving others, based on what they are protesting is just wrong.  It is the essence of discrimination.

  • robert108

    mcair: The left uses loud, intimidating and occasionally violent protest to advance their agenda,  but when prolife people do it, it’s racketeering?  As a leftie might say;  It’s not fair!  Whateve happened to equal protection under the law?  Your people protest legal things all the time.

  • http://SayAnythingBlog.com The_Whistler_ofnd

    Good comeback Mcair, you really sound like an idiot there.

  • 2Hotel9

    As long as it does not interfere with them making money. The MSM is all about the bottom line, principles are always secondary to profits.

  • robert108

    docdave: it has seemed to me that since the antiwar protests in the sixties, that the goal of the lefties has been to silence and block all ideas that disagree with them.  Don’t know why the MSM hasn’t covered this one.  Oh, maybe because they are part of that effort.  Ya think?

  • http://www.fileitunder.com/ Hoodlumman

    Attack, mcair?

    That’s against the law and not up for debate.  Sloppy wording… 

  • http://sayanythingblog.com robport

    Typical lefty tactics.  Use the law to silence your critics.

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