A Virginia-based legal group is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a lower court ruling that applies federal laws intended for use against the Mob to organizations opposing abortion rights.
The American Center for Law and Justice, an international public-interest law firm, said yesterday it will ask the high court to take a new look at whether the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, statute should be used to punish pro-life groups for staging abortion-clinic protests.
“It is clear that a federal statute – designed for drug dealers and organized crime – has been misapplied and turned against pro-life groups,” the ACLJ’s chief counsel, Jay Sekulow, said. “To let the federal RICO statute be misused to target the pro-life community is not only offensive, but represents a grave injustice.”
In the October 2001 ruling, a lower court awarded damages to abortion businesses, while a federal appeals court upheld the ruling – as well as a nationwide injunction issued against the pro-life groups.
The courts said pro-life defendants were liable for “extortion” and “racketeering” charges under RICO in the case of Operation Rescue vs. National Organization for Women, et al.
But in issuing the rulings, the lower federal courts erroneously let NOW get an injunction under RICO, when the statute only permits the federal government to sue for injunctions under RICO, said the ACLJ.
Also, the lower courts mistakenly held that a protest sit-in is a form of felony extortion, “even though the demonstrators did not ‘obtain property’ from anyone, a required element of extortion. …”
The federal courts also erroneously ruled that it was “harmless error” to let the jury find defendants guilty of “generic state extortion,” a non-existent, fictional substitute for each state’s extortion laws, said the group.
Finally, the lower federal courts violated the First Amendment rights of the pro-life groups, the ACLJ said, “by allowing ‘guilty by association’ absent proof that defendants were truly responsible for alleged harms.”
Sekulow said the high court may decide as early as March whether to take the case.
“To equate a sit-in with criminal extortion and racketeering is an insult to the civil-rights movement, the anti-war movement and just about any other serious social protest movement in this nation’s history,” he said. “We are hopeful the high court considers this case and overturns this disturbing decision.”
