In yet another demonstration of unrestrained devotion to child murder, recent prosecutions initiated by Joe Biden’s rabidly pro-abortion Department of Justice have included charges based on statutes that go all the way back to the end of the Civil War. In effect, Biden’s handlers and hangers-on are attempting to hammer non-violent pro-lifers who hand out prayer cards and pamphlets in abortuary waiting rooms as if they were pistol-wielding night riders in ominous white hoods and robes.
So far, our most disturbing encounter with this perverse prosecutorial strategy has been our defense of pro-lifers charged in connection with a rescue at DC’s Washington Surgi-Center in 2020. The murder mill that DOJ fanatics rushed to avenge in this case is run by Cesare Santangelo, who specializes in late-term child dismemberment and has been credibly accused of delivering babies alive and then killing them. Rescuers here initially faced simple trespass charges, which were soon dismissed. This should have been the end of the matter.
However, Biden’s “Reproductive Rights Task Force“ hauled the case like a zombie from its shallow grave, charging rescuers with crimes under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE). The pro-lifers were also charged with committing “conspiracy against rights,” a Civil War era statute that was part of the Ku Klux Klan Acts, enacted to prosecute Klansmen who terrorized Black voters. Conspiracy against rights carries a 10-year maximum sentence – a draconian punishment for a non-violent rescue.
Although these pro-life heroes received a vigorous defense and our client was not even guilty of FACE, all the defendants were convicted after a brief trial last summer. They were immediately remanded to custody without bail and now languish, yet to be sentenced, in a Northern Virginia jail.
A similar prosecution is currently underway against a group of eleven pro-lifers who rescued at the “Carafem Health Center Clinic,” a now-defunct killing facility in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, back in 2021. In the same crude way, prosecutors link alleged FACE violations to “conspiracy against rights” in order to enhance and increase consequences for non-violent pro-lifers.
The Ku Klux Klan Acts served a legitimate purpose in ensuring that African Americans were able to freely exercise their actual constitutional rights, especially the right to vote, without threat of physical harm. They were not designed to guarantee the ease with which bloody-handed pseudo-surgical ghouls could decapitate and disarticulate little babies of all races.
Pro-lifers need to be aware of this misapplication of the Ku Klux Klan Acts – but they should not be intimidated. The First Amendment still protects all manner of speech and peaceful activities – including those on behalf of babies in the womb.