President Donald Trump granted pardons on his first day in office to hundreds of criminal defendants, but he left out anti-abortion protesters who were charged with Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act violations, sparking renewed calls for their clemency.
Advocates and lawmakers called on Tuesday for immediate pardons for nearly two dozen defendants convicted under the FACE Act after Trump granted clemency the prior evening to the more than 1,200 who were convicted of violent and nonviolent offenses related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
“Biden’s peaceful pro-life prisoners need to be pardoned!” said the Thomas More Society, a legal group that has represented many of the defendants.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) wrote that “they deserve to be free.” LifeNews.com said the defendants should be pardoned “immediately.”
The FACE Act, passed in 1994, makes 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.
Last week, eight lawyers from the Thomas More Society wrote to Trump seeking clemency for 21 of their FACE Act clients, whose prosecutions they said were “fatally flawed.” The lawyers observed that the Biden administration’s Justice Department coupled FACE Act charges, which often result in no more than one year in prison for first-time offenders, with conspiracy charges, which carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.
“The FACE Act was expressly limited at its enactment, and its prescribed penalties were supposed to be sharply circumscribed—the Biden DOJ thus flagrantly violated Congress’s intent in its pursuit of the prosecutions here,” the lawyers wrote.
Lauren Handy, a prominent anti-abortion activist and one of the Thomas More Society’s clients seeking a pardon, is serving out a nearly five-year prison sentence in Tallahassee, Florida, after she was convicted by a jury in 2023 of a FACE Act violation and conspiracy against rights.
Handy organized a blockade at an abortion clinic in Washington, D.C., during which defendants pushed their way into the facility and used chains, bike locks, and ropes to obstruct patients from entering for more than two hours. The defendants prevented a woman experiencing labor pains from accessing the clinic and caused a nurse to fall and sprain her ankle.
In addition to Handy, the Thomas More Society has advocated pardons for most of the other defendants in the case after they received a combined 23 years in prison for the incident.
The group also urged Trump to pardon activist Bevelyn Williams, who was sentenced to more than three years in prison last year after she carried out a forceful blockade at a Manhattan abortion clinic, crushing a woman’s hand in a door in the process.
Williams’s husband lamented the absence of a pardon for his wife but said he remained hopeful that she would receive one.
“The timing may not be our timing but it will happen,” he wrote in a statement on X on Tuesday.
Advocates have also called for a pardon for Eva Edl, an anti-abortion activist and Yugoslavian concentration camp survivor who was 89 years old when she was convicted under the FACE Act last year.
Erin Hawley, senior counsel for the religious legal advocacy firm Alliance Defending Freedom, told the Washington Examiner that the FACE act “was completely weaponized by the Biden DOJ.”
“President Trump issued a sweeping pardon of the Jan. 6 defendants, and ADF will be requesting that he pardon the pro-life advocates who were selectively prosecuted under the FACE,” said Erin Hawley, who is married to the senator.
Erin Hawley has been instrumental in abortion policy litigation, assisting ADF in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022 that ultimately overturned Roe v. Wade and arguing last year before the Supreme Court to overturn the Food and Drug Administration’s deregulatory actions on the abortion drug mifepristone.
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In September 2023, Trump said that shortly after taking office he would “appoint a special task force to rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner who’s been unjustly persecuted by the Biden administration.”
Erin Hawley said she is “hopeful that it will be a week-one priority” for Trump to issue these pardons.
