On the one-year anniversary of the Pro-Life
Action League's stunning 8-1 the NOW v. Scheidler
victory in the Supreme Court, a three-judge panel of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals
announced that they are remanding the case to the Federal District Court. Apparently the
appellate judges are giving NOW and Fay Clayton some hope at a second chance.
In their ruling issued Feb. 26, 2003, the
Supreme Court majority wrote, "the judgement that the petitioners violated RICO must
. . . be reversed" and "the injunction issued by the District Court must
necessarily be vacated." It's hard to see what the Court of Appeals can find in these
words to justify remanding the case, rather than returning it to the district court with
an order to reverse the judgement and vacate the injunction.
"If this weren't an abortion case, we would
be surprised by the result," said Joe Scheidler, the chief defendant named in the
original case, which dates from 1986. League attorneys are weighing several options for
responding to the Circuit Court panel's decision.
Thursday, Feb. 26 was the first anniversary of
our 8-1 United States Supreme Court victory in NOW v. Scheidler,
when the high court ruled that we were not racketeers. The High Court said last February:
Because all the predicate
acts supporting the jury's finding of a RICO violation must be reversed, the judgment that
petitioners violated RICO must also be reversed. Without an underlying RICO violation, the
injunction issued by the District Court must necessarily be vacated The judgment of the
Court of Appeals is accordingly reversed.
While we were still celebrating the anniversary
of this victory, we got notice that the Seventh Circuit had just returned the case to
Judge David Coar's Trial Court finding on behalf of Fay Clayton's gimmicky argument that
the Supreme Court had made a mistake and we are actually guilty. To the normal mind, the
Supreme Court 8-1 ruling in our favor was clear: there is no RICO violation and Judge
Coar's fines and injunction are null and void.
But not to Fay Clayton and her three friends on
the Seventh Circuit. They found four crimes the Supreme Court overlooked. Nobody knows
what these four crimes are. They're just four crimes. Fay discovered them when the High
Court talked about 121 vague and general predicate acts one place and somewhere else
mentioned some unspecified 117 acts.
Fay, a master mathematician, subtracts 117 from
121 and got four, and that's all she needed. She has never given a hint as to what the
four mystery acts are, but they must be there and she is determined to stand by them to
try to nullify our 8-1 Supreme Court victory. All Fay needed was for her three friends on
the Seventh Circuit to buy the "four things" fiction, and they did.
Our attorney, Tom Brejcha, says the Supreme
Court already considered these four allegations in its ruling, and that the last paragraph
of the Supreme Court makes it patently clear that there was nothing left in this case. Tim
Murphy, one of the defendants, said in the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin Friday, that we were
convicted of things we didn't do, were at events we didn't attend, and were plagued by
false witnesses. Murphy calls the whole thing "Kafkaesque."
What's next? We don't know, but we are confident
Fay's trick is just a desperate effort, and that ultimately she'll be scraping egg off her
face. Meanwhile, the Borts still have our house, our 70 grand and have an unconstitutional
injunction against us.
But all that really does is just make us work
harder to put a stop to abortion. We will fight her legal tricks all the way, as they say,
to the Supreme Court, if necessary. Maybe next time we'll get a 9 to 0 ruling. It does
make a good Lenten project. We spent Lent in 1998 in the Court. Now we start our 2004 Lent
with the same case back in the Court. So what else is new? Stay tuned.