By Charles Lane
The Supreme Court ruled today that a lower federal court wrongly punished a national network of antiabortion protesters under a federal law aimed at organized crime, a decision abortion foes immediately hailed as a victory for their movement and others engaged in aggressive social protest.
By a vote of 8 to 1, the justices held that the anti-abortion groups known as the Pro-Life Action Network and Operation Rescue had not committed the federal crime of extortion when they shut down abortion clinics by setting up human chains and roughing up people going in and out during a nationwide campaign during the 1980s.
The protests at times crossed the line into criminal conduct, and prevented the clinics from exercising their right to operate freely, but as long as they did not actually take the clinics' property, they did not commit extortion, one of the crimes that can form the basis for a charge of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
"[E]ven when their acts of interference and disruption achieved their ultimate goal of 'shutting down' a clinic that performed abortions, such acts did not constitute extortion because petitioners did not 'obtain' respondents' property," Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote in the opinion for the court. "[They] may have deprived or sought to deprive respondents of their alleged property right of exclusive control of their business assets, but they did not acquire any such property."
The lone dissenter on the court was Justice John Paul Stevens.
The court's decision overturns a $250,000 damages award that the National Organization for Women and two abortion clinics had won from an Illinois federal jury, as well as a nationwide ban imposed on the protests imposed by a federal judge. NOW and the clinics had sued the protesters under RICO, alleging that the protesters had committed extortion because they had forcibly seized the clinics' and patients' rights to perform and seek medical services.
"The decision removes a cloud that has been hanging over the pro-life movement for 15 years," said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, which represented Operation Rescue. "The ruling clearly shuts the door on using RICO against the pro-life movement."
It may not necessarily open the door to renewed aggressive protests, however, since Congress passed a separate law, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) in 1994. FACE, which did not exist at the time NOW and the clinics filed their RICO lawsuit against the anti-abortion protesters, made aggressive clinic blockades a federal offense.
Nonetheless, groups supporting the right to abortion were disappointed by the ruling today.
"This opinion is a green light to the people who have been orchestrating this violence behind the scenes to proceed full speed ahead," Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women told the Associated Press.
The two cases decided together were Scheidler v. NOW, No. 01-1118, and Operation Rescue v. NOW, No. 01-1119.
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