Abortion Foe Can Plead ‘Necessity’ in Defending Blockade

In what is believed to be a first in more than 600 abortion protest cases, a Los Angeles County judge on Friday allowed an Operation Rescue activist to argue that he blocked the entrance to an El Monte family planning clinic because he believed he was preventing a murder.

Over objections from the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, Rio Hondo Municipal Judge Richard Van Dusen permitted a Catholic priest to lay the groundwork for the so-called “necessity defense” as a justification for blocking the clinic door.

Testifying on his own behalf, Father George Peter Irving, associate pastor of Church of the Assumption in East Los Angeles, told jurors he went to Clinica Eva in December with the intent of saving a life, not trespassing.

“My intention was to prevent children from being slaughtered inside that place,” said Irving, 37, who was one of four protesters placed under citizen’s arrest by the clinic’s manager. “That was my exclusive goal.”

Representatives of the district attorney’s office and the Los Angeles city attorney’s office said it was apparently the first instance in the county in which a judge had allowed antiabortion defendants to argue that breaking the law was necessary to prevent a greater harm from occurring.

In the hundreds of other trespassing cases against Operation Rescue protesters in Los Angeles, prosecutors have successfully excluded such testimony on the grounds that abortion is legal and, therefore, does not pose a “significant evil” that would justify breaking the law.

Permitting such a defense “has the potential of turning the case into a real circus,” said Los Angeles Deputy City Atty. Kjehl T. Johansen, who has supervised the prosecution in most of the Operation Rescue trials.

Johansen monitored the trial Friday to prepare for the possibility that the defense may be permitted in other Los Angeles cases.

“It comes down to a debate on whether abortion is good or bad, and that seems way beyond the scope of a Municipal Court trespassing case,” he said.

In a pretrial hearing Monday, Deputy Dist. Atty. DeAnn M. Delgado borrowed the same legal terminology that has been used by the city attorney’s office to exclude such a defense, but Van Dusen rejected her motion.

During the trial, which began Thursday and is expected to continue through next week, Delgado has also been unsuccessful in repeated objections to statements by Irving’s lawyer aimed at broadening the matter to include questions about abortion. Doctors and other witnesses for Irving are expected to testify that they believe abortion is murder and that life begins at conception.

“It’s an extreme shock,” Delgado said. “This trial should be about obstructing a thoroughfare, not a debate about when life begins.”

An Operation Rescue spokesman said, however, that it was the first time the group has been given a fair trial.

“We’ve finally found an honest judge,” said Dave Conrardy, field director of the organization’s Southern California chapter.

The case stems from a Dec. 19 blockade of Clinica Eva, also known as Family Planning El Monte, in which nearly 100 Operation Rescue protesters sat for four hours in front of the clinic’s front and back doors.

In an unusual twist, the group also tipped off police to an arrest warrant pending against the clinic’s manager, Eva Winchell, for failing to pay a fine imposed Sept. 6, 1989, when she pleaded no contest to operating the clinic without a license.

Winchell, 54, who said she had simply forgotten to pay the fine before the deadline, was escorted by officers to nearby Rio Hondo Municipal Court, where she wrote out a check for $1,645.

Then she returned to the clinic and asked police to arrest four of the demonstrators sitting nearest the doorway.