Almost one month ago, on September 15, Jonathan Darnel was convicted of conspiracy against rights and FACE Act violations stemming from an October 2020 rescue action at the D.C.-based Washington Surgi-Clinic abortion facility. Immediately following his conviction, Darnel and his co-defendants Jean Marshall and Joan Bell were taken into custody by federal marshals. They, along with five other defendants tried separately, are currently incarcerated at the Alexandria Adult Detention Center in Northern Virginia.
Live Action News spoke with Darnel by phone on October 12 about how he and the other rescuers are coping with incarceration, prospects for appealing their convictions, and what the pro-life community can do to support the rescuers and end abortion.
STATUS OF APPEALS
Asked about his plans to appeal, Darnel stated that, to his knowledge, all of the rescuers have filed appeals, excepting possibly Joan Bell, who represented herself and might have difficulty filing an appeal from jail. However, Darnel noted that “our appeals should affect her.” He said they currently have what is called an interlocutory appeal pending; this is intended to effect their release pending sentencing, which still has not taken place.
Asked whether he had any information about when sentencing might happen, Darnel responded: “It probably will take a long time. There are guys in here with drug charges and various other charges. Some of them haven’t been sentenced for months and months.” He said one of his fellow inmates has been incarcerated for two years without being sentenced.
The rescuers are only incarcerated currently because the jury deemed their actions during the rescue – in which all participants were totally committed to non-violence – to be “violent.”
“The idea that you would send … 75-year-old women to jail for committing violence on somebody is laughable,” Darnel told Live Action News. “I hope the public recognizes what an enormous outrage it is. This should be a real big issue,” he stated, adding, “It should be an issue in the presidential campaign. I mean, you just don’t do this kind of thing in America.”
Darnel said he sees fellow rescuers Will Goodman and John Hinshaw on a regular basis at religious services held inside the jail, although they are in different cell blocks. “We’re handling it fairly well,” Darnel stated, adding that he is “making good use of the time” while jailed. “I’m learning a lot, praying a lot, keeping in the Bible.” He is also improving his Spanish by studying the Bible and praying with Spanish-speaking fellow Christian inmates.
How pro-lifers can help
Asked what supporters can do beyond offering prayers for the rescuers, Darnel responded: “There’s a lot of things that can be done on the outside to use our case to benefit the pro-life movement and save babies.”
He praised the work of pro-life organizations that focus on education, particularly on college campuses, saying, “I’ve been there, I’ve seen minds change. I’ve seen people dumbfounded because they don’t have an answer for our arguments. But,” he added, “rescue is the sort of thing that we should want to do.” This is because, in his words:
Everything else is not pro-choice ideologically, but it’s pro-choice functionally. We allow the woman her choice when it comes down to it. When she can’t be persuaded to stop, and she and her boyfriend walk in the doors [of an abortion facility], we allow her that choice.
Rescue denies her that choice, at least for a period of time. It denies people the choice to murder. And that should be what we all are either doing or desperately wanting to do.
I do encourage people to rescue, because we need that example of selfless sacrifice to drive others on and make us all feel uncomfortable for just letting abortion happen right under our noses for so long. We should be impatient.
Patience is not necessarily a virtue. When it’s somebody else suffering, it could be a vice.
We should be righteously indignant. And even if you can’t rescue or feel that that’s just strategically bad, you should be wanting to rescue. You should be desperately hoping that you could do that. Look zealously for some other way to invest your energies. And in that way, I think it will help us find a definitive end to this problem without having to wait another 50 years.
Darnel also said that we should support Representative Chip Roy’s efforts to repeal the FACE Act. “Even if you’re pro-choice, and you think people should not be blocking the doors of abortion clinics, the outrageous penalties levied against rescuers is just totally out of proportion to the so-called crime,” Darnel stated. “I think that everybody should tell their congressmen and senators to support [Rep. Chip Roy’s] bill and pass it through both halls of Congress as soon as possible.”
THE IMPORTANCE OF ACTION
Darnel emphasized the need for the pro-life movement to get more serious about acting on its principles. He expressed the hope that other pro-lifers would learn by the rescuers’ current situation “that defiance of wicked law is an essential part to ending abortion. We have to act like abortion is a big deal through our actions and not just our words, and rescue does that.” He continued: “And furthermore, we should be calling on local governments from the states all the way down to your local police officer to defy wicked orders that defend the abortion industry.”
Darnel added:
There’s a lot of people on the other side who are gonna fight tooth and nail and do everything within their power to allow folks to kill kids. They’re very much personally invested in it. And playing by the rules – legal rules and so forth – I don’t think it’s gonna cut it. It has to be civil disobedience. We can’t just trust the system to work itself out to our advantage and for justice to prevail when you’ve got people in power who literally think murder is tolerable.
Constitutional democracy was not made for people like that. … You need to have both a moral populace and local power structures, local governments, that are willing to defy the various tyrants and do what’s right within their areas. … They should be willing to put it all on the line to keep people from killing their kids, at least within their jurisdictions.
This is the sort of thing we need to be asking for. … And we need to ask every major pro-life, Christian, [and] Catholic leader to take a position, at least in support of others rescuing and the defiance of wicked government in their own areas, if not the endorsement for their own congregations to participate.
Darnel continued:
I pray that more people continue talking about rescue, and challenging our pro-life presidential candidates on what they’ll do about [abortion], and just force this issue to a head.
The worst thing that can happen for the preborn is that everybody just forgets about them. The next worst thing that can happen is that everybody gets afraid of persecution [against] themselves, and so they abandon the preborn.
But if just enough of us decide that we’re gonna let the persecution – at least temporarily – fall on us instead of them, I can see an end for this within our generation, if not within this decade or sooner.
In conclusion, Darnel expressed the prayer that God would “help us to be both charitable and merciful, but at the same time, rigidly insistent that no person be left behind, and that we not allow our own desire for comfort and ease to trump justice.”
