President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that he granted pardons to nearly two dozen anti-abortion protesters who were charged with Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act violations, marking the latest in a series of clemency actions in Trump’s first week in office.
Trump said from the Oval Office as he signed the clemency document that they “should not have been prosecuted.”
“Many of them are elderly people,” Trump said, adding that “this is a great honor to sign this.”
Trump said he was pardoning 23 defendants. Some of their names were visible on a list he displayed from his desk. A record confirming all of the recipients and details of their clemency was not yet available as of this publishing.
Lauren Handy, 31, was perhaps the most prominent anti-abortion protester to receive clemency, according to Trump’s list. She has been serving a nearly five-year prison sentence in Florida after she was convicted by a jury in 2023 of two charges, conspiracy against rights and a FACE Act violation.
Handy and nine others organized and attended what they described as a “rescue” at an abortion clinic in Washington, D.C., in 2020. The incident involved the defendants using chains, bike locks, ropes, and their bodies to block the clinic entrance for more than two hours. During the mayhem of pushing their way into the clinic, a nurse fell and sprained her ankle, and one woman unable to enter the clinic was experiencing labor pains, according to court papers.
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who presided over the case, observed during Handy’s sentencing hearing that her actions prevented multiple patients from entering the clinic.
“Your views took precedence over, frankly, their human needs,” Kollar-Kotelly said.
The FACE Act was passed in 1994 and made it a federal crime to obstruct abortion clinics, as well as anti-abortion pregnancy counseling centers and churches. Under President Joe Biden, FACE Act prosecutions multiplied and were directed almost entirely at anti-abortion activists, despite an uptick in attacks on both types of facilities in recent years.
Handy is a repeat offender who was sentenced in 2022 to a short stint in jail in Michigan for trespassing at an abortion clinic and obstructing a police officer. She also took her protests a step further that year in Washington, D.C., when police officers discovered she had obtained the remains of five fetuses, which they said had undergone abortions “in accordance with D.C. law.” Handy said she retrieved their remains from outside the Washington clinic.
Her co-defendants, at least some of whose names were also visible on Trump’s clemency list, spanned a range of ages, from 27 to 76 years old, at the time of their sentencing. They were all convicted in trials, except for one, who pleaded guilty. Their sentences ranged from 10 months to three years in jail.
Martin Cannon, senior counsel at the Thomas More Society and Handy’s attorney, told the Washington Examiner after their sentencing last year that although they broke the law, he felt the prosecutions and penalties were handled inappropriately.
Cannon said it was highly unusual to see the DOJ couple the FACE Act, which often would result in no more than one year in prison for first-time offenders, with a conspiracy charge, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.
He said it has “two effects that could be seen as dirty pool.”
“One of them is to take a misdemeanor and make it worth 10 years in prison,” Cannon said. “The other thing it does is it convicts, say, 10 people, like in this case, when only two actually did any blocking, or maybe three. If you can’t prove your case against the other seven, call it a conspiracy, and you got them anyway.”
Eight lawyers from the Thomas More Society petitioned Trump to pardon 21 of their clients, arguing that the prosecutions had been “fatally flawed.”
After he granted clemency to all the violent and nonviolent defendants convicted over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Trump faced growing calls this week from activists and lawmakers to grant the FACE Act defendants clemency, including from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and his wife, Erin Hawley, a senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom.
SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser celebrated Trump’s decision and thanked him for “delivering on his promise to free pro-life protesters.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“Pro-life moms, grandmothers and even Eva Edl, a Communist prison camp survivor, were thrown in jail for peacefully protesting abortion,” Dannenfelser said. “As if that were not enough, aggressive sentences were handed down, like five years for Lauren Handy who sought to expose evidence of late term and potentially illegal abortions in the nation’s capital.”
Edl, whose story includes surviving a Yugoslavian concentration camp, was another pardon recipient. Edl was around 89 years old when she was convicted of a FACE Act violation last year and sentenced to three years of probation. Court papers pictured Edl and others obstructing an entryway at a Tennessee clinic in 2021 and noted that police had given them ample warnings. Edl was also convicted by a jury for the FACE Act last year for a similar incident in Michigan but had not yet been sentenced.
