Attack ad says he supported an abortion-clinic bomber and excused violence. In fact, Robert said clinic bombers should be prosecuted fully.
An abortion-rights group is running an attack ad accusing Supreme Court nominee John Roberts of filing legal papers �supporting . . . a convicted clinic bomber� and of having an ideology that �leads him to excuse violence against other Americans� It shows images of a bombed clinic in Birmingham , Alabama .
The ad is false.
And the ad misleads when it says Roberts supported a clinic bomber. It is true that Roberts sided with the bomber and many other defendants in a civil case, but the case didn't deal with bombing at all. Roberts argued that abortion clinics who brought the suit had no right use an 1871 federal anti-discrimination statute against anti-abortion protesters who tried to blockade clinics. Eventually a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court agreed, too. Roberts argued that blockades were already illegal under state law.
The images used in the ad are especially misleading. The pictures are of a clinic bombing that happened nearly seven years after Roberts signed the legal brief in question.
NARAL Pro-Choice America released a new ad focusing on John Roberts, President Bush's nominee to fill Sandra Day O'Connor's vacant Supreme Court position, called "Speaking Out," on August 8. NARAL said it plans to buy half a million dollars worth of airtime in coming weeks on national cable networks, as well as well as on networks in Maine and Rhode Island.
In words and images, the ad conveys the idea that Roberts took a legal position excusing bombing of abortion clinics, which is false. To the contrary, during the Reagan administration when he was Associate Counsel to the President, Roberts drafted a memo saying abortion-clinic bombers "should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law." In the 1986 memo, Roberts called abortion bombers "criminals" and "misguided individuals," indicating that they would get no special treatment regarding requests for presidential pardons. Reagan in fact gave no pardons to abortion-clinic bombers.
The 1986 draft is on file at the Reagan library. The White House furnished a copy to FactCheck.org.
The ad fails to mention that the "court briefs" it mentions are actually from nearly seven years before the abortion clinic bombing talked about in the ad. The woman in the ad, Emily Lyons, was injured by a bomb blast at the New Woman/All Women Health Clinic in Birmingham on January 28, 1998 that also killed an off-duty police officer. The bomber was Eric Rudolph, who was captured in May 2003 after a five-year manhunt. Rudolph pleaded guilty and in July 2005 was sentenced to two consecutive life terms without parole.
The brief that Roberts signed, and on which the NARAL ad is based, is from another matter entirely. It is dated April 11, 1991. Furthermore, it is from a civil lawsuit brought by abortion clinics against protesters who were blockading the clinics. Bombing was not an issue.
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