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One Small Step Back to Equal Justice and Liberty? Pray It Is So.
According to reports this afternoon, a jury in Philadelphia has just found Mark Houck not guilty of all charges brought against him by the bloodthirsty goons of the Department of [In]Justice. They had sent dozens of FBI agents in SWAT riot gear to arrest him in front of his wife and children. The context is set forth in this report from Just The News:
Philadelphia jury on Monday found pro-life activist Mark Houck not guilty on both federal charges in relation to an Oct. 13, 2021, altercation with an abortion clinic volunteer.
The Department of Justice pursued charges against Houck, alleging that he “forcefully shoved” Bruce Love, a Planned Parenthood volunteer, in violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.
Houck’s defense contended that Love had been “harassing” his son in the leadup to the altercation. The Thomas More Society, which represented Houck, celebrated the jury’s decision.
As a reminder, here is the full SWAT team in action, almost certainly traumatizing this citizen’s entire family:
Many of us watched Tucker interview Mrs. Houck and saw the video she took of this outrage.
One should note a great debt of gratitude to the obviously superb lawyering done in his favor by the Thomas More Society :
“We are, of course, thrilled with the outcome,” stated Peter Breen, Thomas More Society Executive Vice President & Head of Litigation. “Mark and his family are now free of the cloud that the Biden administration threw upon them. We took on Goliath – the full might of the United States government – and won. The jury saw through and rejected the prosecution’s discriminatory case, which was harassment from day one. This is a win for Mark and the entire pro-life movement. The Biden Department of Justice’s intimidation against pro-life people and people of faith has been put in its place.”
One small step? Is it too much to hope that we may finally be seeing the beginning of the end of this tyrannical police state a/k/a the Biden-Garland Justice Department? I’m going to go ahead and permit myself some cautious optimism and Thank God for this act of pure, American justice… at last.
Published in General
Well that’s good news. Should have never, ever come to that point. Hopefully he can sue and give the Feds pause on further dubious charges.
Even moreso than regular street cops, the feds never pay for any misconduct out of their own pockets.
Our genius Founders gave us a jury system to protect us from over-zealous prosecutors and it worked in this case. However, do not ever get arrested in D.C. That jury pool is just as anti-American as the prosecutors.
I think the message has been sent. If you speak out against abortion the Biden Administration has no issue with using a SWAT team to terrorize your family, throw you in jail, and force you to defend yourself against charges that even the prosecutor knows are bogus. The goal was never conviction, the point was to scare pro-life activists.
Yes, but a long, difficult trek to go.
There’s that too, of course. “The process is the punishment. And I expect the DOJ can “afford” to prosecute a lot more people than the legal-aid groups can afford to defend.
It is darker than that. If they got their conviction , an honest man goes to jail . They would be just aok with that.
These people are EVIL !
Thanks for mentioning the DC problem; I meant to put a note in the post about the fact that he would very likely have been convicted had they filed the complaint in the District. I don’t have the words to politely describe the anger I feel about the way the Federal District Court Judges in DC have conducted themselves ( most of them, anyway) in the January 6 cases. If the bias of the juries were not enough- I think the figures are somewhere around 90% of DC went for Biden — the Judges obviously decided they were going to make sure most if not all of these defendants were convicted. They are a disgrace to what was once, and hopefully may be again in the future, a proud profession.
Sad but true. A very, very, very long way to go.
Seeing the Feds all dressed up in their full combat gear, with their low-slung holsters and all, takes me back to my younger years playing cowboys and injuns.
It seems, looking back on a rather long life, for a good part of it, we were taught that one should use the word evil very sparingly because so few people were truly evil. Now, we seem to be engulfed in evil– evil people like the ones who brought about this fine man’s arrest and trial, evil ideologies like not only believing in, but fervently advocating like a religion, the “right” to kill a baby right up to the point it is born, the evil of depriving American citizens of their right to have their vote, one of their most precious rights, fairly counted and thus depriving them of their right to choose their government, evil people to whom lying and dishonesty have become an accepted way of life with little or no thought given to the consequences of that kind of belief to the country, not that they ever really think of the country in the first place- I dare not go on or I will be writing the rest of the night. I guess I am saying in a long-winded lawyer’s way is that I agree with your description 100%. I also wish 100% that I didn’t have to agree with you, but the evidence is too clear to avoid it.
Verdict form likely to be posted soon:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/65371323/united-states-v-houck/?filed_after=&filed_before=&entry_gte=&entry_lte=&order_by=desc
It may be a small step but only that because this good man was saved by the conscience of those on the jury and not the reform of a corrupted system that has been correctly described here as evil. The hope for justice is that those who either practice or abide that evil will be replaced by individuals with conscience and clarity.
There needs to be a high bar for the use of SWAT teams when serving warrants and conducting searches . . .
Probably not a factor, of course, but the US Attorney for Eastern PA who signed the charging docs and directed this travesty is a Biden appointee and the first LGBTQ woman of color to occupy that office.
This was flat-out ideological and religious persecution. Jacqueline Romero needs to be carefully scrutinized and perhaps asked to spend a little time in a witness chair on the Hill. Ted Cruz was right to oppose her nomination.
Who ordered the FBI swat team to arrest this man and terrorize his wife and kids. Shouldn’t somebody be made to apologize for that and disclose all communications that led up to it?
There is an excellent piece on this unsavory affair in the Wall Street Journal by William McGurn entitled “Justice for Mark Houck”, here, which brings out a few interesting facts such as the fact that the Judge asked the prosecutor whether federal law didn’t “seem to be stretched a little thin here.” That, along with the facts outlined about the prosecutor in #15 by @oldbathos, makes things much clearer, albeit even more corrupt. Question: how can the Face Act, representing a direct violation of the First Amendment, possibly pass the constitutionality test? It’s been on the books since 1994 and it seems amazing to me that it has not been successfully challenged in all that time. Any thoughts on that question?
Mark my word, the FBI will find another way to charge him.
they pay no penalty for these kind of charges.
Nor, obviously, do far-left State officials, as Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakes in Colorado can confirm! His case is going back to the Supreme Court for the second time soon. They are relentlessly bloodthirsty.
On its face, the FACE Act is a “time, place, and manner” restriction of the type that is permitted under First Amendment jurisprudence. An assortment of such laws exist to prohibit blocking roads, disturbing the peace in residential housing areas, and trying to influence judges by protesting at their homes. Challenges are appropriate when such laws are not enforced evenly, thus rendering them Constitutionally invalid “as applied” rather than on their face (such as by enforcing them only outside abortion clinics but not outside “pro-life” prenatal care clinics). Such “time, place, and manner laws can also be challenged as unconstitutional as applied when prosecutors claim the law has a scope so broad that it prohibits activity well beyond the purpose of the law, which purpose in the case of the FACE Act is to allow people to patronize the abortion clinic or prenatal care clinic. It sounds like the judge may have been raising the possibility that the prosecutor might be pushing the scope of the law farther than the law permits.
[Edited after initial posting to clarify some details.]
“[B]loodthirsty goons”?
No one was shot, right? No one was cut. There was no blood.
There doesn’t even seem to be any report about the SWAT team breaking down the door. They just knocked, apparently. Well, “pounded,” according to the picture from Tucker Carlson’s show. Oh, and “swarmed.” Maybe that was excessive, maybe not. I don’t know the circumstances.
I am generally pleased with the jury verdict. I think that the rhetoric of the post is excessive.
I am given to understand that you are a member of the Bar. Assuming that is true, I must, with the utmost of respect, of course, tell you that I consider it nothing short of astonishing that a practicing lawyer would hold the above statement out as a measure of justice to be accorded a citizen of the United States of America.
I am grateful that you cleared that up for us although it is hard to understand how you can be so sure that these “proper” “gentlemen” were ever so gracious in view of one of your very next statements:
As a practicing lawyer, I must assume you know the importance of knowing the facts before you speak; it is obvious that you did not allow this pesky little obstacle deter you from waxing eloquent about matters you yourself admit you know nothing about. To be clear, as I was not at the Houck home the day the FBI goons showed up — dozens, according to Mrs. Houck, who is in one hell of a better situation to “know the circumstances” than either of us– so all I have to go on are the many reports I have read about this unconscionable intrusion into the home and family of Mr. Houck, a family consisting of, again from reports, SEVEN children.
In order to help you know more about the circumstances before you make more pronouncements about the “excessiveness” of my post, here are a few “facts” (a/k/a “circumstances”) as related by an eyewitness, Mrs. Houck:
Those are facts! “Circumstances.” Easy to find.
Would it matter if the Gestapo sent 25 polite SS troopers to arrest you rather than a few rude, door-breaking goons?
The point is that it was deliberate intimidation purely for ideological reasons. There is no way in hell, the FBI had the slightest reason to believe this guy was a threat requiring that much firepower. It was a psychological beatdown of an ideological enemy, a deliberate humiliation and a demonstration of power. There is no honorable or innocent explanation for these “circumstances.” It was an arrest for a trivial incident and a case that should never have been brought. The entire affair was done in bad faith by corrupt ideologues. The fact that no one in the FBI was troubled by how they were used and leaked accordingly is also very upsetting. There should be a groundswell to oust those who engineered this travesty but apparently Obama’s legacy was a successful cleansing of enough decent people from federal law enforcement to make it dangerous.
Correct, those conducting the arrest should nave to prove to the judge that this amount of force is necessary, beginning with ‘Have you asked the individual to appear voluntarily? ‘ Have you notified the individual’s attorney? ‘ Is there any reason to believe this individual is violent?’
Roger Stone had a boat and a helicopter at his arrest.
Maybe those extras are on some kind of “use it or lose it!” setup.
But are you sure you want judges routinely involved in telling law enforcement ahead of time how to assess the risks LEOs face and how much force to use? I am not.
Around here, judges are routinely releasing felony defendants without bail on a promise to appear for all but the most serious offenses. It’s deplorable but it leads me to think they’d almost never authorize actual force in advance, leading to even more dead LEOs.
There’s also the fact that the court personnel most often asked to sign off to authorize a warrants are not full judges, but appointed magistrates or court commissioners, so not accountable to the public but to the court that appoints them.
My lifelong respect for the FBI diminishes each time I read of incidents such as this. The FBI seems to have become a willing tool of the activist Left.