Anti-Abortion Leader Guilty of Trespassing

ATLANTA â€”  Anti-abortion leader Randall Terry was found guilty Friday of criminal trespass and unlawful assembly for leading a protest at an abortion clinic during the Democratic National Convention here last year.

Terry, director of New York-based Operation Rescue, handled his own defense during a turbulent four-day trial in which the presiding judge frequently admonished several dozen anti-abortion activists who packed the courtroom.

Sentencing Scheduled

Terry, whose sentencing is scheduled for Thursday, faces up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine on each of two counts on which he was convicted. Prosecutors asked Fulton County Judge John Bruner to impose the maximum.

Bruner refused to allow Terry to introduce evidence on abortion during the trial, but the defendant and prosecutor Robert Lee O’Brien Jr. focused on the controversial medical procedure during closing arguments Friday to a jury of four women and two men.

“Before God, I was trying to save innocent life--even just one,� Terry told the jury.

The 30-year-old activist said he had been jailed several times as a result of protests and compared himself to such figures as black civil rights activists Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, women’s suffrage campaigner Susan B. Anthony and the English Quaker dissenter William Penn.

Tells of Jailings

O’Brien countered that the people Terry named were jailed because they attempted to win rights denied to them while Terry was seeking to block women from exercising their right to abortion.

Terry, who remains free on bond, later said he would appeal.

The Operation Rescue leader and more than 100 others were arrested July 19, 1988, after they blocked the front doors of the SurgiCenter abortion clinic.