An anti-abortion activist who led a blockade of a reproductive health clinic in Washington, D.C., in 2020 and drew widespread attention after the authorities found human fetuses at her home was sentenced on Tuesday to nearly five years in prison, the New York Times reports. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of U.S. District Court in Washington sentenced the activist, Lauren Handy, 30, of Virginia, to 57 months in prison for her role in the blockade, officials said. Ms. Handy was one of several people convicted last year of civil rights conspiracy and of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act in connection with the blockade. That law makes it a crime to threaten, obstruct or injure a person seeking access to a reproductive health clinic or to damage clinic property. Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said in a statement on Tuesday that Ms. Handy and her co-defendants had “conspired to use force to prevent fellow citizens from exercising rights protected by law.” “People cannot resort to using force and intimidation to prevent others from engaging in lawful activity simply because they disagree with the law,” he said.
Martin Cannon of the nonprofit Thomas More Society law firm, which represented Ms. Handy, said in statement that she and her co-defendants had “conspired to be peaceful" and that the firm would “vigorously pursue an appeal of Ms. Handy’s conviction.” Steve Crampton, also a lawyer for Handy, said in an interview on Tuesday that his client had been sentenced “for engaging in what Lauren vowed to make a nonviolent, peaceful demonstration against abortion.” Handy, who directed the invasion and blockade of the Washington Surgi-clinic on Oct. 22, 2020, arrived for an appointment she had made at the clinic under a false name, prosecutors said. That was when she and her co-defendants pushed their way into the waiting room and blocked its doors with their bodies, furniture, chains and ropes. Prosecutors said the blockade had prevented two patients from entering the treatment area, including one who was “experiencing labor pains and in need of immediate medical attention.” That patient had to lie on a hallway floor outside the clinic “because the co-defendants refused to allow her and her husband to enter,” prosecutors said. The other patient, they said, “was forced to climb onto a chair and through a receptionist window in the waiting room” to enter the treatment area.
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