Pro-life activists given prison sentences for Tennessee abortion clinic blockade

Federal sentences for three defendants imposed Sept. 26-27 in connection with a March 5, 2021, blockade of an abortion clinic in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, leave only sentencing in a Michigan case in the current round of Justice Department prosecutions of clinic blockades.

Judge Aleta Trauger of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee sentenced Chester Gallagher, 73, of Lebanon, Tenn., a former Las Vegas police officer and the organizer of the blockade, to 16 months in prison and three years of supervised release for the blockade at the carafem abortion clinic on March 5, 2021.

Heather Idoni, 63, a former bookstore owner from Linden, Michigan, was sentenced to eight months in prison, to run concurrently with the two-year sentence she has been serving for a 2020 clinic blockade in Washington.

Eva Edl, 89, of Aiken, S.C., whose involvement in clinic protests goes back to the 1980s, received three years of probation.

All were convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act, as well as a felony charge of conspiracy against rights.

Gallagher, Idoni and El also face sentencing for their convictions over blockades at Michigan abortion clinics — Northland Family Planning Clinic on Aug. 27, 2020, and — for only Idoni and Edl — at Women’s Health Clinic in Saginaw in April 2021.

There were eight other defendants sentenced at the district court in Nashville. Sentenced in July were: Calvin Zastrow, 57, of Kawkalin, Mich., a prison term of six months, with three years of supervised release; Coleman Boyd, 51, of Bolton, Miss., five years of probation and a $10,000 fine; Paul Vaughn, 55, of Centerville, Tenn., time served and three years of supervised release; and Dennis Green, 56, of Cumberland, Va., time served and three years of supervised release.

James Zastrow, 25, of Eldon, Mo., Eva Zastrow, 24, of Dover, Ark.; and Paul Place, 26, of Centerville, Tenn., received 90 days of home detention and three years of probation. Caroline Davis, of Macomb, Mich., who pleaded guilty last year to misdemeanor charges and cooperated with prosecutors, was sentenced to three years of probation in April. All are evangelicals.

Henry Leventis, U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, said in a statement that Gallagher’s sentence was “a reminder that we cannot pick and choose which laws we follow, and that those who violate the law will be held accountable.”

The FACE Act, adopted in 1994, prohibits obstruction and intimidation at both abortion clinics and pregnancy resource centers that counsel against abortion.

By statute, FACE Act convictions with the conspiracy charge added can result in prison sentences of up to 10 years. But the longest sentence imposed so far has been 57 months for Lauren Handy, 31, of Alexandria, Va., convicted in 2023 of a blockade at Washington Surgi-Clinic in 2020 in Washington. Handy, a Catholic, is currently in federal prison in Florida.

The Catholic Church opposes abortion because it holds that all human life is sacred from conception to natural death. The church also makes clear that all advocacy for justice must use only moral means, with St. John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical, “Veritatis Splendor,” stating that a person cannot “intend directly something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order … even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of society in general.

All the FACE Act trials since 2022 have ended in convictions of all defendants.

Steve Crampton, an attorney with the Thomas More Society, a Chicago-based public interest firm representing Gallagher, observed in a Sept. 24 webcast that 25 percent of all FACE Act cases were brought in the past two years.

That is the outcome of a Justice Department task force set up by Attorney General Merrick Garland in the summer of 2022 following the Supreme Court overturning its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which had enshrined legal abortion as a constitutional right, and returning regulation of abortion back to the legislature. All the prosecutions since then have been for clinic blockades from 2020 through 2022, before Roe’s reversal.

A Justice Department tally in a June press release noted that since January 2021, “The Department has brought 25 cases involving a total of 57 defendants accused of criminal FACE Act-related violations.”

Three civil suits against pro-life activists by the Justice Department are also pending.

The department will not say whether the pursuit of criminal and civil charges over abortion clinic blockades is in any way slowing down. In response to an OSV News query, a representative stated, “Pursuant to standard practice, the Justice Department does not confirm or deny the existence of investigations.”

The Thomas More Society has announced an appeal of Gallagher’s conspiracy conviction in Michigan. It is based on a recent Supreme Court decision, Fischer v. United States, in which the court narrowed the interpretation of “obstructive conduct” for three men charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol as Congress met to certify the presidential election results.

“We hope to knock it completely out of the water on appeal,” Crampton said in the webcast. “We’re very optimistic.”

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