Weaponizing the Legal System: The Case Against the Florida 4

A look at the case of the Florida 4, pro-choice activists in Florida recently sentenced for spray-painting slogans on an anti-abortion center. For more background, go here.

On March 10, 1993, outside Florida’s Pensacola Women’s Medical Services clinic, in the midst of an anti-abortion protest taking place in the parking lot, Dr. David Gunn exited his vehicle and was shot three times in the back by Ku Klux Klan member and anti-choice zealot Michael Griffin, who was shouting, “Don’t kill any more babies!” This was the first documented murder of an abortion provider in the United States. This anti-abortion violence shook the country and ushered in a dangerous era of abortion providers and patients being terrorized by anti-choice extremists.

Since 1977, in the United States there have been 11 murders, 42 bombings, 200 arsons, 492 clinic invasions, 375 burglaries, and thousands of other criminal incidents directed at abortion providers, patients, and volunteers, at their workplaces and their homes. This wave of violent actions against reproductive health service providers continued until Congress finally mobilized. The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act, was signed into law in 1994 by President Bill Clinton, to address the marked increase in traumatic violence that abortion doctors, clinicians, and patients had been experiencing since the late 1970’s, which had reached a critical point by the early 1990’s.

Prior to the passage of the FACE Act, anti-choice activists who physically blocked, openly harassed, and assaulted patients and workers entering reproductive health facilities avoided criminal prosecution based on misapplied First Amendment defenses. For the FACE Act to garner enough votes to pass in Congress, Republicans demanded that the definition of reproductive health facility be broadened to include religious-based “crisis pregnancy centers” or, as Planned Parenthood refers to them on its website, “fake clinics.” As Planned Parenthood explains: “Most crisis pregnancy centers aren’t legitimate medical clinics, so they don’t have to follow HIPAA and keep your information private, like most real health providers do. These crisis pregnancy centers could even give your information to other anti-abortion organizations or use it to harass you. This could be especially concerning if you live in a state with anti-abortion laws.”

Thirty years have elapsed since the signing of the FACE Act and we’re now witnessing the first pro-choice activists to be prosecuted under an act designed to protect abortion doctors and patients. This week, Amber Smith-Stewart, Annarella Rivera, and Caleb Freestone faced sentencing in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. Amber Smith-Stewart and Annarella Rivera were both sentenced to 30 days in custody and 60 days of house arrest while Caleb Freestone was sentenced to 1 year and 1 day in Federal prison; each will have 3 years of probation; no fines were imposed. All three avoided becoming the first pro-choice activists convicted under the FACE Act, and instead pled guilty to felony conspiracy; they faced a maximum of 10 years in prison and a $55,000.00 fine. Although they didn’t receive the maximum time allowed in prison, they never should have been charged in federal court to begin with–and now they have to move forward in their lives with a federal felony conviction.

What did they do to warrant such serious charges? On May 28, 2022, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision was leaked to the public, and on June 26, 2022, two days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade by formally issuing Dobbs, Amber, Annarella, Caleb, and one other person went after-hours to two nondescript “fake clinic” buildings in Hollywood and Winter Haven, Florida, and tagged a wall of each one with spray paint. The graffiti read, “If abortions aren’t safe then neither are you” and “Jane’s Revenge.” Two of the codefendants later tagged another building in Hialeah, Florida, on July 3, 2022. The political slogans the four people spray-painted on the outside of the buildings while no workers or patients were present were slogans Smith-Stewart had seen on signs and banners at the Women’s March she had just attended in Washington, D.C. Firey rhetoric maybe; but not arson, murder, or even forcing patients to run a gauntlet of harassment and assault on their way to their appointment as so many pro-choice people have had to do.

Ms. Smith-Stewart and her co-defendants later expressed how frustrated, scared, and demoralized they were by the loss of bodily autonomy and reproductive choice they, like the majority of Americans, supported and thought was a guaranteed Constitutional right.

Months later, in early 2023, the four were arrested and charged in federal court for two counts of violating the FACE Act and one count of conspiracy. The charge of “graffiti” would normally be a local court misdemeanor resulting in community service hours and perhaps a small fine, but in this case it landed them in federal court facing felony charges that carry up to a 10-year prison term, casting them in starring roles in a political tug-of-war that emerged following the radically conservative Dobbs decision…and did we mention this was in Florida.

In an attempt to weaponize the laws that were meant to protect abortion providers and their patients, Florida Senator Marco Rubio penned two letters to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in May and June of 2022, falsely claiming that “Jane’s Revenge” had relentlessly targeted the anti-choice/anti-abortion movement and must be prosecuted as terrorists. Rubio’s desire to paint pro-choice activists as violent terrorists was likely an attempt to distract the public from an overwhelmingly unpopular partisan Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, and an attempt to save political face after a minority political view hijacked a fifty-year precedent of public health and bodily autonomy. The political right and the religious organizations that spend wildly on their re-election campaigns have attempted to create a false moral equivalency between pro-choice activists who engaged in minor property damage and violent, in-your-face anti-choice activists who carried out a decades-long campaign of terror on doctors and patients.

At the sentencing on September 12, 2024, Amber Smith-Stewart’s attorney, Lauren Regan, argued that any sentence other than probation and community service hours would result in unwarranted sentencing disparities—forbidden by the federal sentencing guidelines. She set forth dozens of FACE Act cases and sentences to use as comparators. There was not a single case that had facts as nonviolent and with as little property damage as this case. For instance, a case from 2021 involved an anti-abortion man who intentionally broke five security cameras and a window at a Planned Parenthood clinic while it was open for business. He came back three days later and threw a cement block through a window at the clinic and tore down the clinic’s intercom system while the clinic was serving patients. The clinic was forced to close for over four months as a result of the damage. He was sentenced to two years of probation on each count and restitution in the amount of $24,650.16.

Even more troubling, a case in the Middle District of Florida (the same court we were in) involved another anti-choice man who firebombed a Ft. Meyer Planned Parenthood Clinic with Molotov cocktails—the second one thrown at the clinic set it on fire. Though charged with arson, possession of an incendiary device, criminal mischief and FACE Act, he was sentenced on the FACE Act count to 8 months in custody—four months less than Caleb Freestone for spray painting. Shockingly, Judge Hernandez Covington revealed her true bias when she stated that spray painting words on the outside of a building would be more threatening to the workers than showing up to find your reproductive health clinic was firebombed. Apparently militant graffiti in support of abortion rights is scarier to this Judge than a far-right extremist committing arson at a Planned Parenthood clinic.

Defendant Annarella Rivera said, “I’ve supported and raised two children by working in my chosen field of ob/gyn healthcare. When not working, I’ve spent countless hours escorting patients to and from clinical appointments for their safety and the safety of our workers. Simply put, women’s health and ability to choose their own path is my passion and calling. I never thought that the act of spray-painting a fake healthcare provider would result in the FBI violently raiding my house or that I would become a pawn in the fight for a person’s right to bodily autonomy — something an overwhelming majority of citizens in the United States believe in.”

Amber Smith-Stewart, a 23-year-old artist at the time of her arrest, had no prior convictions. She expressed remorse that the spraypainted slogans on the side of so-called crisis pregnancy centers may have caused employees to feel unsafe. “In hindsight, I understand that the slogans we spray painted in 2022 could have been taken as a threat which was not our intent. The real threat here remains the assault by a vocal minority against a person’s right to choose. This is where the real danger lies. The Dobbs decision puts lives at risk. People seek abortions for a multitude of reasons, and the decision to terminate or carry a pregnancy to term should never be made by power brokers in Washington, D.C. In my case, my own life would be at risk if I was subjected to a forced pregnancy.”

Lauren Regan of the Civil Liberties Defense Center, stated, “It is deeply unjust that these social justice activists have been used as political pawns in the highly contentious national fight over abortion and access to reproductive health care —and under Joe Biden’s Department of Justice.”

The loss of bodily autonomy and reproductive choice has only been exacerbated by the dirty tactics and lies perpetrated upon the American public in an attempt to roll back 50 years of Supreme Court precedent. Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh both lied during their confirmation hearings to the public, as well as privately in the offices of Republican and pro-choice Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Collins, who voted to confirm Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, said on May 3, 2022 in response to the leaked Dobbs decision, “If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office.”

The fact remains that 63% of all Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. This case is a clear signal that far right conservatives are blatantly abusing the legal system for political gains and have shed any perception of an unbiased judiciary. The fact also remains that when young people face a decade in federal prison for graffiti, regardless of the message, and one of them gets more time in prison than a firebombing arsonist, something behind the scenes is dangerously unjust.

Photo by Matthew Essman on Unsplash