Jury Rules Against Abortion Protesters

A federal civil jury on Monday found that two national organizations and three protest leaders conspired to shut down abortion clinics and deprive women of the right to end their pregnancies, marking a novel use of an anti-racketeering law to stop a plot based on political ideology.

A panel of four women and two men decided that Operation Rescue and Joseph Scheidler, Timothy Murphy and Andrew Scholberg of the Chicago-based Pro-Life Action League threatened property and attempted extortion in an orchestrated campaign against clinics across America that reached its height during the 1980s. The jury said the defendants are not guilty of plotting murder or murder threats.

The National Organization for Women and Susan Hill, president of a company that owns eight clinics, brought the suit in 1986 as antiabortion militancy reached fevered heights. Parts of the case have reached the U.S. Supreme Court during its 12-year history.

Randall Terry, who directed Operation Rescue and now is running for Congress in New York, settled out of court in February.

The remaining defendants are liable for $85,000 in damages to two clinics, one in Milwaukee and another in Wilmington, Del., owned by Hill’s company. Under the racketeering law, they must pay triple that amount--$255,000--along with legal fees. And because the lawsuit is a class action, other facilities are expected to file claims.

More than 900 clinics across the country perform abortions. The National Abortion Federation, an association of abortion providers, said it will urge its members to sign onto the suit.

*

U.S. District Judge David Coar also will consider issuing a nationwide injunction against the defendants. Terry already has agreed not to participate in or organize blockades.

An appeal from the others is likely.

“I am not a racketeer. I save babies,” Scheidler said evenly outside the courtroom Monday.

Blockades--the placing of singing, chanting human buffers outside clinic doors to keep anyone from getting inside--have been prohibited since the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinics Act was signed by President Clinton. Use of the tactic in the abortion wars has waned since then.

But feminists on Monday said the verdict, after nearly three days of jury deliberation, backed up their contention that a small group of “bullies and brutes,” in the words of NOW attorney Fay Clayton, promoted “the zeal of nasty acts”--moving beyond preventing entrance to vandalism, pushing, shoving and specific threats of retribution.

“We’ve worked so hard for this,” said Eleanor Smeal, who was NOW president at the time the suit was brought and currently heads the Feminist Majority Foundation.

Smeal said she hopes the outcome will persuade law enforcement officials to use the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations measure as a lever against antiabortion crusaders who break the law, as they have against the Mafia.

“Over 25% of our nation’s clinics are still victims of violence,” Smeal said in a telephone interview from Las Vegas, where she was addressing 600 women in law enforcement. Pointing to two recent clinic bombings in Atlanta and Memphis, Tenn., that have been linked by investigators, Smeal added: “There doesn’t have to be one conspiracy. There can be many.”

Still, G. Robert Blakey, a Notre Dame law school professor who drafted the RICO statute, warned that if the verdict stands, the price of civil disobedience will go up.

“This ruling makes the Boston Tea Party a RICO,” he said.

Blakey represented Scheidler before the Supreme Court in afailed effort to block the application of RICO to any group that does not seek economic gain. “This has nothing to do with left or right,” he said. “When we wrote this in 1970, [some politicians] were petrified that the [Richard] Nixon administration would use this statute against the anti-war movement. Let’s talk politics. NOW is looking to stop all demonstrations against abortion, good ones and bad ones.”

Colleen Connell, associate legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, strongly disagreed. “There’s so much that can be done that is legal to discourage abortion--discouraging women from getting them, doctors from providing them, persuading Congress to change laws,” she said. “There’s just an entire universe of protected activity besides violent conduct directed at another person aimed at depriving them of a right.”

In Washington, D.C., the National Right to Life Committee said in a statement that the organization “will continue to work through peaceful means.”

The lawsuit alleged that the defendants worked together through the Pro-Life Action Network, forged by Scheidler from his own Pro-Life Action League and other militants. A photograph taken at a network conference in Appleton, Wis., in April 1985 as clinic bombings were on the rise shows a message of greeting on a marquee: “Welcome pro-life activists. Have a blast.”

“It does not appear that he [Scheidler] tried to direct clinic violence from a distance,” authors James Risen and Judy L. Thomas wrote in their book “Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War.”

“Instead,” they wrote, “what Scheidler did was use his role as a national spokesman to encourage and condone violent acts. Extremists could read between the lines.”

Scheidler’s most important protege was Terry, who led Operation Rescue through dramatic, highly emotional blockades from Milwaukee to Wichita to Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, 252 arrested protesters spent Easter Sunday of 1989 at the county jail, singing “Amazing Grace” and “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” More than 400 more were scattered through other jails in the metropolitan area.

Scheidler, whose prominence in the antiabortion movement has diminished, said he has no intention of ceasing his activities. “I’m in this,” he said, “till the day I die.”