Pro-life activist Paul Vaughn, who was convicted for violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, was sentenced Tuesday in Nashville, Tennessee, to three years of supervised release including six months home detention, avoiding prison time.
The Department of Justice had asked for prison for a year and a day, saying in a sentencing memo that encountering pro-life activists was traumatic for patients and anything less than a year would fail to address the seriousness of the offense.
Mr. Vaughn is among six who were found guilty in January of violating the FACE Act on March 5, 2021, at an abortion clinic in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. The abortion provider has since closed. The FACE Act prohibits interference with obtaining or providing abortions.
Steve Crampton, Thomas More Society Senior Counsel and attorney for Paul Vaughn, said he was pleased the judge showed leniency but the conviction is still an injustice.
“Paul Vaughn and his co-defendants stand convicted of defending the inalienable right to life,” Mr. Crampton said in a statement, adding that the charges should never have been filed.
Three other participants in the case will be sentenced July 3: Calvin Zastrow a Michigan preacher; Denny Green of Virginia, director of Life and Liberty Ministries; and Coleman Boyd, an emergency room doctor and father of 13, who lost his job after the Tennessee conviction.
Two other participants, Heather Idoni of Michigan, who is currently in prison for another FACE Act charge, and Chester Gallagher of Tennessee, will be sentenced for the Tennessee case after their Michigan trial for yet another FACE Act violation.
The group went to the hallway in front of the abortion clinic that day and read from the Bible, sang church hymns, and talked to women. Some participants blocked the door to the business, but Mr. Vaughn was down the hallway away from the door.
Mr. Crampton described the event as a peaceful demonstration, oriented toward persuading expecting mothers not to abort their babies.
“For his witness to life, the FBI raided Paul’s home at gunpoint in front of his wife and children, then brought down the full weight of the United States government to prosecute Paul,“ he said. ”We will continue to advocate tirelessly for pro-lifers like Paul.”
FACE Act charges have grown more frequent since the Supreme Court’s June 24, 2022 Dobbs Decision, which overturned Roe V Wade and sent abortion policy back to the states.
Days after that decision, on July 8, 2022, President Biden issued an executive order for his administration to address “the heightened risk” of getting an abortion. He formed the Reproductive Rights Task Force, a Justice Department-led group focused, in part, on enforcing the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.
Juat after the Dobbs decision, the Carafem Health Center in Mount Juliet paused in-person services “due to the state’s complete ban on abortion,” according to Carafem’s website.
On Aug. 25, 2022, Tennessee made abortion illegal, allowing rare exceptions only to prevent the death of the woman or serious, irreversible medical harm.
The defendants were charged in October 2022, after the abortions they were trying to stop were essentially outlawed, and the business they stood near was closed.
Thomas More Society attorneys are preparing an appeal to overturn Mr. Vaughn’s conviction and challenge the constitutionality of the FACE Act.
At the Faith and Freedom Coalition in Washington, D.C. former President Donald Trump vowed to free jailed pro-life activists if elected.
“For his witness to life, the FBI raided Paul’s home at gunpoint in front of his wife and children, then brought down the full weight of the United States government to prosecute Paul,“ he said. ”We will continue to advocate tirelessly for pro-lifers like Paul.”
And yet, the 2020 bLM/Antifa rioters who burned cities to the ground went untouched. Got it.
JUST Like the hundreds who picketed out side supreme court justices homes, AND EVEN WENT SO FAR AS to make death threats, WERE NOT EVEN arrested, let alone charged with anything.
In this democrat party former Supreme Court political monopoly abortion game of “you first rape them, then we’ll scrape them” at the American taxpayer’s expense, do not allow them to pass go, but go directly to the gender mutilation clinics they have created, that slices and dices and removes the treat of their inability to Self-govern their properly created and assigned reproductive organs, so the public taxpayer can be given a fair financial shake, and opportunity to keep their own tax dollars and not finance any more debt created for the murder of innocent life. Abortion is the killing of two human life forces. The innocent baby for one, and the American human life forces expended in earned income creation, expended in the unnecessary government abortion expense funding that extinguishes the life of the baby. NOBODY voted for that, but the unelected establishment managed to hang it about our necks for decades until Trump put enough people into the Supreme Court to bring justice to those whose lives that were cut short without even a chance to grow up and vote, who replaced putting people who kill into jail to protect those law abiding people that respect human life force, with putting the American people of valuable Life force into Jail, and rewarding those that promote murder and death, disguised as a woman’s right to healthcare that in reality is out right death care for an American society beguiled into secular socialism.
Matthew 2:18 – “In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they were no more.”
America has become the modern day Rama, that thanks to Democrats is morphing into the modern day GAZA, where life is cheap, and only earned national death and destruction come to those who devalue it. King Herod would be proud of what we have become, and Joe Biden will go out of power and out of life, the same way as Herod, choking on his own corruption remembering the lives he has cost us both military and American unborn.
Well, just looking at the sheer # OF rapists illegal invaders, it certainly SEEMS LIKE the left loves rapists..
OH YEA we know they do, see Hollywood, Epstine etc!