“An incident that is more like home raids by Red Guards during China’s Cultural Revolution than like what we should expect in the United States of America”
Sometimes, the recitation of facts in a judicial opinion speaks volumes. A decision this morning from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Ohio, captioned Bray v. Planned Parenthood, et al., No. 12-4476 (6th Cir. Mar. 21, 2014), is one of those cases.
Michael Bray, the plaintiff, is not a terribly sympathetic character; he wrote a book in 1994 advocating violence against abortionists, and served four years in prison in the 1980s for a series of bombings of abortion clinics. (Like Bill Ayers, Bray never injured anyone and denies any intent to do personal harm, but as we know, setting off bombs in populated areas is a hazardous business).
In 1993, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that clinic protests by he and his wife Jayne did not violate the Civil Rights Act of 1871, a/k/a the Klu Klux Klan Act, but the following year, at the urging of the Clinton Administration, Congress responded by passing the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. Planned Parenthood immediately filed suit against Bray in Oregon under the new federal statute that was more or less designed to target him, and won a $110 million jury verdict, reduced on appeal to $850,000. It then set about trying to collect the judgment from Bray’s book sales, which as you may imagine don’t seem to have been particularly extensive.
More @ Red State
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