Court rules pro-lifers not racketeers

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The Supreme Court unanimously ruled yesterday that federal extortion and racketeering laws cannot be used against protesters at abortion clinics, ending a legal battle that has gone on for 20 years.

The high court's 8-0 decision effectively bars efforts by pro-choice groups to bankrupt the pro-life movement by using federal anti-mob laws against protest groups, claiming that such organizations were violent criminal conspiracies.

But in his 15-page decision for the unanimous court, Justice Stephen G. Breyer ruled that "physical violence unrelated to robbery or extortion," such as demonstrations by abortion opponents at clinics, "falls outside the scope of the Hobbs Act," the federal extortion statute enacted in 1946.

"Congress did not intend to create a free-standing physical violence offense ... the Hobbs Act defines 'extortion' as necessarily including the improper 'obtaining of property from another,'" concluded Justice Breyer, who was appointed by President Clinton and usually supports the right to abortion.

He noted that pro-lifers demonstrating at abortion clinics "did not obtain property from women seeking to enter clinics to get abortions and so 'did not commit extortion.'"

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who was not on the court when the case was argued, was the one justice not to sign the decision.

Justice Breyer also held that Congress addressed violence outside abortion clinics by passing another statute, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, in 1994.

But Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, charged that by vacating a nationwide injunction against abortion clinic protesters "on narrow, technical grounds, the Supreme Court sided today with thugs and bullies, not peaceful protesters."

Mrs. Gandy held that the injunction "contributed to the dramatic reduction in clinic violence that we have witnessed in recent years."

She noted that the 1998 injunction was imposed after a Chicago jury found that clinic demonstrators had engaged in a pattern of racketeering by interfering with clinic operations, damaging clinic property, menacing doctors and assaulting patients.