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Home Action News Winter 2006 History, 1996-98, Part 2

Winter 2006 ACTION NEWS | VOL. XXV No. 1

Due to its length, this story is divided into two parts.

Part 1 Part 2

Pro-Life Action under Siege, cont.

Pro-Life Conferences Abound

The Pro-Life Action Network (PLAN) held its annual conference in Milwaukee that August. Prior to the convention, three Milwaukee abortion clinics filed suit against fifty-two pro-life activists, including me, calling our meeting a "convention of terrorists," and seeking a temporary injunction against demonstrations at any Milwaukee abortion clinics. The injunction was denied and the suit later dismissed.

[Lillith Fair protest]

League protest of feminist-organized Lilith Fair, August 1997

American Life League held a Celebrate Life convention in Tampa, FL and invited Ann and me to give a joint presentation on working as a pro-life family. This was the first time we had given a pro-life talk together and it proved to be a challenge since we both like to talk, and we each have a lot to say. We talked about how being full-time pro-life activists impacted our children, and how important children are in the lives of pro-life activists.

We held our sixth Meet the Abortion Providers conference in November in New York City. Joan Appleton told how the medical community tries to wash its hands of the abortion business by referring patients to the abortionists. She also took the pro-life movement to task for "using" former abortionists by heralding them as "victories" while failing to recognize the ongoing anguish these men and women have to live with after their years in the abortion industry.

Dr. Marie Peeters Ney spoke about the work of the Centurions, a ministry to former abortion providers and others who have been complicit in abortion. Dr. Anthony Levatino, who had testified at the League's first Abortion Providers conference in 1986, spoke togother with his wife Cecelia about how Tony's involvement in abortion impacted their own lives and how he emerged from the abortion industry and now speaks for life.

NOW v. Scheidler Trial Looms

Judge David Coar finally set a trial date for NOW v. Scheidler, with jury selection to begin March 2, 1998. Judge Coar was convinced the trial would last only two or three weeks, but attorney Tom Brejcha pointed out that there were too many issues and witnesses for that. The trial actually ran seven weeks.

In December 1997 Randy Terry signed a Settlement Agreement with NOW and the clinics to avoid going to trial. Since Operation Rescue was simply a d/b/a ("doing business as") of Randall Terry, we expected that Operation Rescue would also be dropped. But Judge Coar did not agree and Operation Rescue continued as a defendant represented by the American Center for Law and Justice, in spite of the fact that it no longer existed.

All of December and the first two months of 1998 were devoted to preparing for the RICO trial. Ann spent most of her time at the Pro-Life Law Center helping to organize exhibits and line up witnesses. Several family members spent two days at Fay Clayton's office reviewing audio and video tapes that Clayton had amassed in her effort to prove a conspiracy among pro-life activists, noting any statements Clayton might construe as evidence of conspiracy.

The legal team was joined by Debra Fischer, a friend of my daughter Catherine who had recently received her law degree. She was newly married and living in St. Louis, but commuted to Chicago for weeks to prepare for the trial and offer invaluable assistance to Tom Brejcha with my defense. Debra stayed at our house when she was in town and she and Ann worked night and day on the case.

Shortly before the RICO trial in Chicago, I was sued by Summit Women's Health Organization in Milwaukee with claims almost identical to the federal NOW suit. Despite Tom Brejcha's efforts, Judge Coar failed to recognize the significance of a parallel suit in state court. On the eve of the RICO trial, Summit settled the case, dismissing charges against me. Since both the charges and the plaintiff was the same as in the NOW v. Scheidler case, the settlement should have derailed the RICO trial. But NOW's attorneys raced to Milwaukee, demanded an "emergency" hearing, and managed to get the judge's order changed to indicate that he did not intend to affect the federal class action suit.

The patent unfairness of this case was in evidence again as jury selection began. Anyone identified as a Catholic was eliminated as a juror, as was anyone who admitted to being against abortion. It took two days to select six jurors and four alternates from a pool of eighty candidates.

NOW v. Scheidler Trial Begins

In their opening statements on March 4, both Fay Clayton and her husband, Lowell Sachnoff, who represented the abortion clinics, claimed that the defendants were linked to bombing, arson and murder, despite Judge Coar's pre-trial ruling against any mention of such crimes, since there was no evidence that any of the defendants were involved in violence. But Coar refused to declare a mistrial.

Clayton produced an elaborate chart showing the alleged structure and membership of PLAN, the supposed "enterprise" through which I ran the entire pro-life movement and ordered "illegal activities." It was fascinating, and even flattering, although entirely false. However, the chart looked official and probably quite convincing to the jury.

I felt I needed some spiritual support during the trial, so I set up a small shrine on the defendants' table with a statue of the Blessed Mother, a Rosary and the Infant of Prague. The shrine was carefully concealed behind a barricade of binders with all the exhibits for the trial. If Judge Coar ever caught a glimpse of it, he never mentioned it.

We defendants sat at a table to the left side of the attorneys' table. The plaintiffs sat with their attorneys on the right side of the room, near the jury box. Before each session, morning and afternoon, Fay Clayton introduced the NOW representative for that session, having carefully recruited a diversity of women—old, young, black, white and Asian.

Each day, one of my sons or daughters sat at the defendants' table with me, and on one occasion my grandsons Nate and Sam attended. But finally Fay Clayton had had enough of pretty girls and handsome young men on the Scheidler side of the room. She complained to one of the marshals that having these family members on parade would give me an unfair advantage. Judge Coar then ruled that only defendants would be permitted to sit at the table, but allowed Clayton to continue introducing her NOW representative at the start of each session.

Clayton Throws Dirt

Day after day, I sat and listened to accusations about my activities, most of which were a complete surprise to me. I was accused of master-minding demonstrations and rescues that I had never even heard of, and of visiting abortion clinics for the sole purpose of striking fear into the hearts of poor little abortion clinic administrators and receptionists. Some of the incidents testified to had already been proven baseless, yet they were presented to the jury as facts. Clayton's approach seemed to be to throw as much dirt at me as she could and figure that some of it was bound to stick in the jurors' minds.

For several days she questioned Susan Hill, owner of the abortion clinics serving as class representatives, then put other abortion clinic administrators on the stand to testify as to how frightened they were when Joe Scheidler or other pro-lifers showed up in front of their clinics. She pulled statements out of context from radio programs and even from private letters I had written to friends and family.

Witness after witness testified to the presence of protesters wearing pro-life T-shirts and several mentioned that I left my business card at their clinic offices. They produced a blown-up business card on which I had written "Choose life!" and construed that as a death threat! It seemed to be a conspiracy by T-shirt and business card, in the absence of any real evidence of wrongdoing.

Finally on March 25, the pro-life side got its turn. Some of Operation Rescue's witnesses were so focused on getting the court and the pro-abortion attorneys to adopt their rhetoric that they were almost as damaging as the pro-abortion witnesses. When my own witnesses were on the stand, Fay Clayton repeatedly asked on cross-examination, "Would it surprise you to know. . ?" followed by various accusations against me. For example, Clayton asked Dr. Jack Willke, "Would it surprise you to know that Joe Scheidler called you a ?wimp for life?'" Undaunted, Willke replied: "I've probably called him a few things over the years too." Never mind that I had never called Dr. Willke a "wimp."

[Verdict]

Joe, Ann and Tim Murphy after the April 20 guilty verdict was announced

Unjust Trial Drags On

When Congressman Henry Hyde came to the stand in my defense, Clayton and Sachnoff managed to get a ruling from Judge Coar that he could not be referred to as a congressman. Under Lowell Sachnoff's questioning, "Mr. Hyde" said about me, "He is my hero. He has the guts that I wish"—he was cut off there by Sachnoff, but finished his thought anyway—"more of us had." Hyde concluded by saying, "Had people, feeling as does Mr. Scheidler, surrounded and even obstructed the entrance to Dachau or Auschwitz, there may have been fewer people incinerated there." Similarly, both Norma McCorvey and Sandra Cano (Roe and Doe respectively) testified on my behalf, but the jury was not allowed to know they were the women named in the Supreme Court's abortion decisions.

The trial dragged on for seven weeks. Finally on April 20 the jury announced their decision: Guilty! We were "Racketeers for Life." We began to plan our appeal, but had to wait for Judge Coar to issue his ruling in the case, which would not come for another fourteen months!

But NOW couldn't wait to celebrate. They held a victory celebration on in Chicago and another in Wilmington, DE on April 28, where Fay Clayton was honored by Planned Parenthood. We went to Wilmington and greeted the celebrators with large graphic abortion signs and others reading Planned Parenthood Lies to You. In this way we signaled to Fay Clayton that despite the guilty verdict, we weren't going to back down in our defense of life.

Next Issue: "Pro-Life Action Fights Back, 1998-2002"

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