Not sure I agree that the issue is so clear cut. A man steps out of a car and shoots at children on a playground. You are driving by. Do you swerve your car across traffic (law #1 broken), drive over top of the guy (law #2 broken) because you “think” he was shooting at the children (but didn’t see any of them fall, yet), then back up over top of him to make sure he doesn’t get up (illegal parking, law #3 broken)?
Where is the “due process” and the all that habeas corpus stuff? What would you do? This fellow saw a cold-blooded abortionist murdering children. The man paraded it in public. Real viable children. Are you so sure that you would not break laws under certain circumstances? It feels like I might under certain circumstances and I’m not sure this Kansas guy is so evil.
Like it or not, what Dr Tiller did for a living, was not against the law. Yes “The Law is an Ass”, as Shakespeare put it, but it’s what we have to work with. We must work to get the law changed. But what this numbnut did, was to make it even more difficult to change the law.
If you are right in the initial assessment of the situation, yes, it is entirely acceptable under established law to do exactly what you describe.
If you are wrong, you’re going into a small place for a very long time.
Do the right thing - and make sure you are, indeed, right.
The legal term is “the principle of competing harms”, to wit: doing a minor harm to prevent a major harm is reasonable. In the issue at hand, this principle indeed applies: having confirmed some 60,000 lost, and having established those who could stop it won’t, it is clear that losing one more can save thousands more. (Oh, and the “but they’ll just go elsewhere” line is a lame copout. You don’t give up on a war because stopping one soldier didn’t stop the army.)