‘Your God’s wrong’: Judge erupts in angry tirade, sends pro-life activist back to jail

TORONTO, Ontario, March 22, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – An Ontario Court of Justice judge erupted in a lengthy, angry tirade against pro-life activist Mary Wagner – and ejected a spectator from the public gallery – in a downtown Toronto courtroom Wednesday. The judge then sent Wagner to jail for an additional 92 days, added to 88 days already served prior to trial, after finding her guilty of mischief and two counts of failing to comply with probation orders.

The charges related to Wagner’s November 8 arrest at the site of the Bloor West Village “Women’s Clinic.” Wagner has been arrested on several occasions for peacefully entering abortion facilities in Toronto, where she presents women in the waiting room with a rose and offers them pro-life counseling.

The remarkable scene played itself out after Crown attorney Derek Ishak and defense counsel Russell Browne made a joint submission to Mr. Justice S. Ford Clements for time served plus a three-year probationary term. But Clements emphatically rejected the submission.

“She can sit in jail, if that’s the only way to protect people,” he fulminated, calling Wagner “cowardly” for “abusing other human beings” and not having the courage to make her views known through other channels. “This is an extraordinary waste of resources. Get a grip!”

“You don’t get it, do you? What’s the rule of law? You’re required to abide by it … You’ve lost the right as a citizen to be anywhere near an abortion clinic or to speak to an employee,” he said.

“You’re wrong and your God’s wrong,” he continued. “You have complete contempt … There is a right to (abortion) in this country … You don’t have a right to cause (abortion-seeking women) extra pain and grief the way you do.”

“[Abortion] is legal,” he continued, “that’s all you have to understand … You start causing people emotional pain and harm, you think that’s okay?”

He then asked Wagner whether she would stay away from abortion sites for three years as required by the proposed terms of probation.

Earlier, one of Wagner’s supporters in the public gallery spoke up and was addressed by Clements. “These (life issues) are deeply held beliefs. We respect the rule of law. There are ways to change the law. The rule of law is absolutely fundamental. We see what happens in the streets when the rule of law is ignored,” he said. “You wouldn’t like someone in your vestibule every night. People who can’t deal with that, we lock them up.”

After a noon recess, Clements observed that joint submissions by the Crown and defense were not binding on a judge. He said in his view, the submission as it was would be contrary to the public interest and would bring the administration of justice into disrepute.

Asked whether she had anything to say prior to sentencing, Wagner said she saw the rule of law as a guidepost, not an absolute. “The letter of the law does not always maintain justice … abortion is a short-term solution but causes long-term pain,” she said.

She added she never acts out of a lack of sensitivity, but rather attempts to love the women to whom she speaks. She also pointed to examples from history where people who were initially regarded as criminals were later found to be in the right.

Clements was unmoved. “You have, in some measure, displayed utter contempt for the courts and the rights of others,” he said. “You appear to be governed by a higher moral order than the laws of our country.”

“Your determination to break the law is a potential threat to the well-being of society and plants the seeds of lawlessness, perhaps even anarchy … You are unable to accord some civility and respect to others. Your view in law is wrong.”

In concluding, Clements accepted the testimony of abortion site co-owner Patricia Hasen, who filed a victim impact statement that claimed financial hardship caused by Wagner’s actions, including the necessity to hire a “counselor” from another abortion site. Hasen also said she was “scared a bit” when Wagner allegedly held a door open, adding she “doesn’t trust this woman’s peaceful demeanour” and worries about potential aggression. “These people do not work alone.”

Crown attorney Ishak, in his submissions, charged that pro-life activists “prey upon the emotional vulnerability” of abortion patients as “they evidently pursue martyrdom.” The “flouting” of laws, he charged, harken back to “the Dark Ages” and blurs the line between might and right. He suggested Wagner’s actions mark an increase in “the aggressive nature” of pro-life demonstrations, creating emotional distress.

There was no immediate word on whether Wagner planned to appeal either the verdicts or what amounted to a six-month jail sentence. There is also an option to file a complaint with the Ontario Judicial Council over Clements’s statements and conduct in the courtroom. According to the OJC website, “If you have a complaint of misconduct about a provincial judge or a justice of the peace, you must state your complaint in a signed letter. The letter of complaint should include the date, time and place of the court hearing and as much detail as possible about why you feel there was misconduct.”

JustSayNotoNannies:

Under the (7-2) SCOTUS decision in Dred Scott vs. Sandford (1850s), blacks were deemed not to have standing to sue in the courts of the United States because they were not citizens, that no black slave or free ever had been a citizen nor ever could become a citizen even if freed or free-born and that Congress has no authority to prohibit slavery in northern states under the Missouri Compromise of 1820. That embarrassment of a SCOTUS decision (rivaled only by Herod Blackmun's Roe vs. Wade) was effectively reversed by the outcome of the War Between the States and by the enactment of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.

The Dred Scott decision thus had attempted to irrationally define out of the human race those persons of black African ancestry. Roe vs. Wade attempted to define out of the human race or even out of personhood preborn human beings. Read the Herod Blackmun decision some time in full for his concession that his infamous decision could not stand if the personhood of the pre-born were ever recognized. I have never in my life felt that abortion was morally tolerable but the Roe vs. Wade decision itself convinced me that it was not legally tolerable or even rational. I was in law school at the time and had favored abortion being declared legal since I was then a libertarian. I was eager to see what rationale the geniuses of SCOTUS had found (that I could not as a mere law student have found and had not found) to justify legalizing abortion. Upon reading the decision, I realized that there was no such rationale or rationalization, abandoned any further ambiguity and have fought abortion ever since. Abortion, as crammed down the nation's throat by Roe vs. Wade, is simply mass murder under color of law.

While Roe vs. Wade is not directly involved in the complicity of the dishonorable Canadian judge and his like-minded colleagues in mass murder, the symptoms in Canada are as they are here. A lot of dead babies who, whatever the rationalizations of these enemies of Western Civilization and of mankind, were human beings, persons and entitled to live and to be protected by law from being murdered.

Well after the late unpleasantness between the states, SCOTUS again humiliated itself and our nation by handing down the (7-1) decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896 which decided in favor of the "legality" of racially motivated Jim Crow laws enforcing racial segregation by the states in spite of the plain language of the 14th Amendment Equal Protection clause. Segregation continued to be allowable under "the law of the land" until Plessy vs. Ferguson was overturned by SCOTUS itself in the unanimous 1954 decision in Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka, KS, outlawing segregation by the states and their subsidiaries in compliance with the 14th Amendment.

The Nazis defined Jews out of the human race and acted accordingly just as Herod Blackmun and six of his SCOTUS colleagues and untold numbers of judges, Canadian and American, defined the pre-born out of the human race and even out of the status of persons and acted accordingly to allow and even encourage their mass murder. In neither case were we obliged morally to submit to such absurdity as though it were reality. Common sense, rationality and objective truth ought not be trumped by subjective and usually self-serving crimes of tyrants. Blackmun's crime will not stand. It is not a matter of whether but a matter of when it will be crushed.

I understand that you are addressing only the legal issue and that you do not favor abortion, but, unless and until we actively resist this holocaust (which is said to have killed 54 million in the USA since 1973 by surgical abortion alone) and, as necessary, the government that perpetrates it, the slaughter will continue. Ms. Wagner has taken her stand on behalf of the babies and on behalf of civilized people everywhere. She is willing to defy the judge to his face leading to her incarceration rather than take the easy (probation) way out. She has therefore denied to the court the submission of herself and of the babies to the law's delusions.

In his famous essay on Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau recounted his story of being jailed for refusal to pay some local tax in protest of slavery (in the 1840s). The story is also told elsewhere of how his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him at the jail and urged him to pay his fine, asking Thoreau: "What are you doing in there?" Thoreau's answer was "Ralph, what are you doing out there? Emerson was as abolitionist as Thoreau but Thoreau was willing to translate his ideals into action. Therein lies Thoreau's moral advantage over Emerson and over the government that jailed him. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a similar vein wrote his Letter from the Birmingham, Alabama Jail. It is well worth reading. letter from the

MRS. DON-O:

I am not aware of a specific decision in which necessity might have been used to protect property but I can speculate. If one parked his car (even legally) and had a conceded right not to suffer trespass by someone breaking its windows, but a nearby fire made it necessary for firemen to break those windows to accommodate a fire hose, I would imagine that necessity might well be invoked even if the fire threatened only property.

Likewise, it would be ordinarily unlawful to trespass upon railroad tracks, necessity should relieve firemen from liability for necessarily placing a fire hose over the tracks. Notice should be given to the railroad to prevent catastrophe by derailment. If it were simply a matter of saving an unoccupied mansion on the hill but by means which necessarily threatened a passenger train derailment, this example would not suffice. At the very least, there must be a balancing of the possible harms resulting from acting or not acting. OTOH, if it were necessary to break the car windows to protect the unoccupied mansion on the hill, subject to civil reimbursement of the car owner, the firemen should be protected by necessity defense of any criminal charge.

Your question is a challenging one.

To each of you: God bless you and yours.

Shamefully, as a student, I really liked the idea of unmarried sex, did not like the idea of condoms (not that I was getting too many opportunities to use them), and therefore opportunistically refused to consider the humanity of the pre-born. I did not favor abortion but I was enough of a hypocrite to keep my "options" open. The awful Roe vs. Wade decision made me face facts. By three years later, I had confessed my sins and had become a volunteer lawyer trying criminal defense cases of arrested pro-lifers on every occasion where I had a chance to do so. It had also occurred to me that there was a major distinction between genuinely loving a woman and merely lusting after her and that the former was infinitely preferable to the latter. I was no saint but I was a bit less of a sinner.

You are absolutely right about genuine libertarianism since abortion is certainly the initiation of unwarranted force against another. Try and convince most libertarians, however. I also knew tow atheist libertarians, Doris Gordon of Maryland and the late John Walker of Rhode Island who were fighting nobly the lonely fight to pursue pro-life from a libertarian perspective as Libertarians for Life. I knew John Walker more extensively and he had been blessed with a formidable mind in spite of his atheism. Doris was a treasure of a human being, although. if she is still living, she must be incredibly old by now.

I was not present at another case in which a young man who was not a matinee idol nor apparently very affluent had impregnated a girlfriend who was determined to abort their child. He actually filed suit, offering to take as much custody as the girlfriend would give him, to pay every nickel of support for the child but asking that she be enjoined from aborting the child. The case came before a friend who was a judge. He was a generally left-wing secular Jewish man but a verrry scrupulously fair judge. He allowed a full trial and ruled in favor of the mother on the basis of Roe vs. Wade but he told the press that they could meet him on the front steps of the court house to hear the rest of his views. He effectively held a press conference in which he expressed his absolute regret that, in his view, he had to rule against the dad because of his judicial oath and because of Roe vs. Wade, expressed his great admiration for the father as a man and as a father, and how little regard he had for the mother in her decision to abort. The judge (I will call him Judge A) died some years ago of cancer. He was also treated quite badly by the judicial system. Please keep in your prayers the cause of his salvation. If salvation could be earned, he would have earned it and I do pray and dare hope that he is with our Heavenly Father.

It's an interesting question. **IF** it is stipulated, for the sake of discussion, that somebody is buying pills which are indisputably lethal as described, I would think you would want to dissuade the act of *buying* the pills, not dissuading whatever they're intending to do in bed (which is not killing somebody.)

But that's as much as I'd want to say about this hypothetical example.

If I were a pharmacist, it would be a violation of my professional and ethical judgment to sell indisputably lethal pills, and I woldn't do so. So there's another approach.

It is reasonable to think that a little last-minute coversation could persuade a woman in an abortionist's waiting room to decide not to kill he baby. Eleventh-hour turn-arounds like this, even after the at-risk mom is actually in the procedure room, happen more often that you might suppose, including women already prepped and in the lithotomy position getting up off the table and saying "I changed my mind."

I read about this happening just days ago: the boyfriend went into the clinic and persuaded the girl to spare their baby.

So I think going into a clinic and offering kind and earnest words, would be more reasonable than any of the hypotheticals offered by you and others on this thread.

Reasonable chance of success would a morally relevant factor.

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