Sign the prayer pledge for the nine pro-life rescuers facing a decade in prison.
(LifeSiteNews) — Seven pro-life advocates, including a communist prison camp survivor, face over a decade in prison after having been convicted on Tuesday for a peaceful protest conducted outside of an abortion facility.
Chester Gallagher, Heather Idoni, Joel Curry, Justin Phillips, Cal Zastrow, his daughter Eva Zastrow, and 89-year-old Eva Edl, who survived a concentration camp, were found guilty of violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act and of a “conspiracy against rights,” a charge originally created to deal with the Ku Klux Klan.
“Isn’t Jesus good? Let’s go to the sidewalk and sing,” Cal Zastrow reportedly said immediately after the verdict.
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Their conviction stems from a “rescue” protest the pro-lifers conducted outside of the Northland Family Planning Clinic in Sterling Heights, Michigan — an abortion mill where preborn babies are killed — along with a group of other pro-life advocates. Edl and Idoni were also convicted on a charge due to a similar protest they participated in at the Women’s Health Clinic abortuary in Saginaw, Michigan.
All seven pro-lifers could face over 10 years in prison as well as hundreds of thousands in fines upon sentencing.
Edl, who came close to death by starvation and endured squalid conditions as a little girl in a Yugoslavian concentration camp, has contemplated the possibility that she may die in prison after sentencing for this peaceful pro-life protest.
“When I was indicted, I began to prepare to die there,” Edl told The Daily Signal’s Mary Margaret Olohan earlier this year. “Right now, I am ambivalent. … I’m doing the best I can to get ready. Haven’t talked to a funeral director yet.”
“I’m just being sensible,” she added. “There’s no guarantee that I survive it.”
“I feel very strongly, because of my background, that human life is sacred,” she told Olohan. “Government does not have the authority to permit what God forbids. And murder is forbidden by God.”
Throughout the trial on Tuesday, Edl testified that what sustains her is her faith in Jesus Christ and her understanding that suffering strengthens her, The Daily Wire reported.
She compared the trials with a blacksmith’s “refining fire,” telling the Wire, “We need suffering in our lives in order to be purified and not feel sorry about ourselves,” adding that Christians should say, “Hammer away, Lord, at that anvil.”
Former rescuer Caroline Davis was also charged for the Northland protest, but she is now cooperating with the government and has agreed to testify against her co-defendants at this trial, as she has during other rescue trials. She “pled down her felony charge to a misdemeanor” and has not yet been sentenced for the Michigan rescue, according to The Daily Wire.
Judge Matthew Leitman, an Obama appointee, reportedly “clashed” with Phillips’ attorney David Peters throughout the trial. On Monday, Leitman accused Peters of going “way over the line” by pointing out that the conspiracy against rights charge was designed to deal with groups like the Ku Klux Klan and not peaceful demonstrators.
READ: 3 more pro-lifers sentenced on FACE Act charges after Biden DOJ prosecution
Later, when Peters quoted John Adams’ remark that the Constitution was made for a “moral and religious people,” Leitman reportedly said that he was laying the foundation for jury nullification, in which a jury member opts to not convict due to a moral objection to the law.
Thomas More Society attorneys have filed a Motion to Dismiss the felony “Conspiracy Against Rights” charge, asserting that the June 28 Supreme Court decision Fischer v. United States “prevents the Department of Justice’s use of the statute to multiply the potential prison time associated with non-violent, first-time FACE Act charges.”
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Sign the prayer pledge for the nine pro-life rescuers facing a decade in prison.