Biden-Harris Admin. Continues Streak of Convicting and Sentencing Pro-Lifers

The Biden-Harris administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) has sentenced three more pro-life Americans for defending the unborn. On Tuesday, James Zastrow, Eva Zastrow, and Paul Place were sentenced to 90 days of home detention and three years of probation for violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, according to ABC News. The trio, along with Eva Edl, were convicted by a federal magistrate judge of misdemeanor FACE Act violations in April, relating to a 2021 peaceful protest outside a Nashville-area abortion facility.

Six other pro-lifers were convicted in January on FACE Act violations related to the same protest. Four of them were sentenced earlier in July. Paul Vaughn and Dennis Green were sentenced to three years of supervised release, Coleman Boyd was fined $10,000 and sentenced to five years of probation, and protest organizer Calvin Zastrow was sentenced to six months in jail and three years of supervised release. Prosecutors with the Biden-Harris administration’s DOJ had requested significantly more severe sentences, but U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger cited the motivation of the pro-lifers’ sincerely-held religious beliefs and their “good works in the community” in her sentencing.

Defendant Caroline Davis pleaded guilty to misdemeanor FACE Act violations last year and was sentenced earlier this year to three years of probation. Sentencing has been postponed for Heather Idoni, Chester Gallagher, and 89-year-old Eva Eld, who all face a trial this month in Michigan on similar charges related to pro-life protests. Edl, who survived imprisonment in a communist prison camp in Yugoslavia after World War II, told The Daily Signal in an interview that she does not expect to survive prison after having been convicted of FACE Act violations. “When I was indicted, I began to prepare to die there,” she said in April. “There’s no guarantee that I survive it.”

Prosecution of pro-lifers has become a standard for the DOJ under President Joe Biden and his Vice President, Kamala Harris. Last year, nine pro-life activists with the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU) group were convicted of FACE Act violations for protesting outside an abortion facility in the Washington, D.C. area and were immediately jailed prior to sentencing. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly commented at the time that she deemed FACE Act violations to be “crime[s] of violence.” PAAU Activism Director Lauren Handy was eventually sentenced to nearly five years in prison.

Catholic father Mark Houck was indicted in 2022 on alleged violations of the FACE Act outside a Philadelphia-area abortion facility. Although Houck agreed to cooperate with prosecutors if charges were brought, the DOJ instead sent a team of approximately two dozen FBI agents armed with automatic rifles and riot gear to raid Houck’s home and arrest him in front of his wife and children. Houck was acquitted at trial, but maintains that the raid on his home and subsequent prosecution are part of a broader effort by Biden’s DOJ to silence and intimidate pro-life Americans. According to a lawsuit filed in May, Houck’s children were traumatized by the FBI raid on their home. Houck’s is the only FACE Act prosecution case that the Biden administration has lost since taking power in 2021.

Last year, an FBI whistleblower reported that the agency had applied a special “threat tag,” originally intended to address threats against U.S. Supreme Court justices after Roe v. Wade was overturned, to pro-life Americans. According to DOJ data obtained by The Daily Caller, the Biden administration “is using a novel application of an 1870 statute to enhance the sentences of peaceful abortion protesters.” The DOJ has reportedly added “Conspiracy Against Rights” charges to FACE Act violation charges, ensuring that pro-lifers convicted of FACE Act violations face up to 10 years in prison. Additionally, 97% of FACE Act prosecutions since the law was enacted in 1994 have been against pro-life Americans, even though the law also protects churches and pregnancy resource centers.

“Once again, we see the Biden administration intent on making pro-life activists pay a high price for their attempts to protect unborn life,” said Arielle Del Turco, director of the Center for Religious Liberty at Family Research Council, in comments to The Washington Stand. “This is upsetting for the pro-lifers who received their sentence, but it is also indicative of a leftist-run DOJ that prioritizes targeting ideological opponents while ignoring attacks on churches, for example.”

According to an FRC report Del Turco authored, attacks against churches in the U.S. have increased by 800% since 2018. Between the beginning of 2018 and the end of 2023, there were over 700 vandalism attacks, 135 arson-related attacks, over 30 bomb threats, over 20 gun-related incidents, and a myriad of other attacks, assaults, and threats — all against churches. CatholicVote’s “Violence Tracker” reports that nearly 300 Catholic churches have been attacked since May of 2022, shortly before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Erin Hawley, vice president of the Center for Life and Regulatory Practice at the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), noted that, at least over the course of 2022, no prosecutions were made against those who attacked churches or pregnancy resource centers, although 26 pro-life Americans were targeted with FACE Act prosecutions that year. Since Biden took office in 2021, there have been 55 FACE Act prosecutions, only five of which involved violent attacks against pregnancy resource centers. In total, the Biden administration’s FACE Act prosecutions over the course of less than four years accounts for a quarter of all FACE Act prosecutions over the past 30 years.

“This is particularly relevant now as the election season ramps up,” Del Turco observed, pointing to Vice President Harris’s complicity in the administration’s targeting of pro-life Americans. She recalled that Harris aggressively prosecuted reporter David Daleiden when he published video evidence that “Planned Parenthood was selling the body parts of aborted babies.” Del Turco pointed out that Planned Parenthood was donating to Harris’s senate campaign at the time. “If Harris is elected president, we can expect the attacks on pro-lifers that we’ve seen over the last four years to continue, or perhaps worsen,” Del Turco concluded.