Bob Unruh served up a lazy, stenographic and biased account of an anti-abortion activist facing justice in a May 14 WorldNetDaily article:
A 30-year-old pro-life activist who tried to rescue the unborn from America’s massive abortion industry has been sentenced to nearly five years in prison for her work.
The sentence, 57 months in prison and three years of supervision, came after Joe Biden’s Department of Justice insisted she committed a crime by blockading access to an abortion business.
Officials with the Thomas More Society immediately confirmed they are preparing to proceed with an appeal on behalf of Lauren Handy, a filing that will “seek to overturn her conviction and challenge the constitutionality of the FACE Act.”
That stands for Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances and is used by Biden’s DOJ almost exclusively against pro-lifers, even though the law is supposed to protect both pro-life protesters and those who are employed in the abortion industry.
[…]Steve Crampton, also a lawyer for the society, added, “As I’ve gotten to know Ms. Handy, I’ve seen up close her unwavering passion for pro-life advocacy and resolute dedication to nonviolence. The caricature of Ms. Handy that the Biden Department of Justice fabricated flies in the face of reality. Ms. Handy should have been shown the same mercy that she has herself shown to countless many downtrodden throughout her young life.”
Crampton is lying — but because Unruh can’t be bothered to do any basic research and is just lazily rewriting a Thomas More Society press release, his readers don’t know that. One has to go to an actual media outlet to get the full story:
“Americans have been protesting in favor of and against abortion access for the better part of a century, and there may be nothing more American than these protests” over conflicting views of fundamental rights, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said in handing down the penalty.
“But the law does not protect violence or obstructive conduct — nor should it,” Kollar-Kotelly continued. “That’s what you’re being punished for, not your views on abortion nor your very-American commitment to peaceful protest.”
[…]Handy and co-conspirators live-streamed a preplanned “lock-and-block” blockade that used force and physical obstructions to shut down the D.C. clinic on Oct. 22, 2020, Kollar-Kotelly said in summarizing trial evidence. Prosecutors said Handy was the leader of the group that orchestrated the blockade and recruited participants, arranged lodging and used a fake name to book an appointment. A nurse was injured and patients were traumatized in the incursion, including two women who begged to enter for treatment and one who suffered a medical emergency, the judge said.
“It was not peaceful, and it was not contemplated to be peaceful,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Sanjay Patel argued in a 90-minute sentencing hearing. The government sought a sentence at the high end of a 63- to 78-month range recommended by federal guidelines — up to 6½ years — based on Handy’s leadership role, obstructive conduct, the violence and victims in the case.
[…]The judge concluded that while Handy and her co-conspirators were entitled to have “very strong views about abortion,” she found it disheartening that they “showed no compassion or empathy to women patients who were human beings in pain and seeking medical care.”
That doesn’t sound like someone who has a “resolute dedication to nonviolence” – but, again, Unruh won’t tell you that because partisan narratives mean more to him than the truth and he doesn’t respect his readers enough to report a full set of facts.