Arrest of pro-life advocate spawns lawsuit against City of Cleveland
ADF-allied attorney disputes constitutionality of city ordinances after arrest of pro-lifer who played 9-1-1 tape at abortion clinicCLEVELAND—An attorney allied with the Alliance Defense Fund filed suit today in federal court to have the City of Cleveland’s sound device and noise ordinances declared unconstitutional on behalf of two pro-life advocates. The city used the ordinances as a basis to arrest one of the men outside of an abortion clinic for playing an audiotape of a 9-1-1 recording involving the clinic’s owner.
“We believe the city’s ordinances, as they are written, are open to abuse. Proof of that is found in how they were used to intimidate and silence this man from exercising his First Amendment right to free speech,” said ADF-allied attorney David Langdon with the Cincinnati law firm Langdon & Shafer, LLC. Langdon filed the lawsuit, Hugh Gaughan, et al., v. City of Cleveland, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio. Langdon is also seeking a preliminary injunction to prevent the city from enforcing the ordinances against his clients.
The audiotape contains a recording of abortionist and clinic owner Martin Ruddock talking to a 9-1-1 operator during complications that occurred during an abortion procedure performed on a 30-year-old woman. “I just can’t stop the bleeding. I can’t see what I’m doing and I want her out of here,” Ruddock says on the tape.
Hugh Gaughan played the tape of the 9-1-1 recording outside a Cleveland abortion clinic, Center for Women’s Health, on a number of occasions between December 2003 and November 2004 with the desire that it would help educate women entering the clinic as to the life-threatening dangers inherently associated with abortion.
During that time period, Gaughan was arrested twice and cited with violation of the city’s sound device and noise ordinances after playing the tape. The first arrest resulted from a complaint filed by a clinic employee. On both occasions the charges were dismissed, but Gaughan no longer plays the tape for fear of being arrested again. The other plaintiff, Thomas Raddell, the Cleveland area director of Operation Save America, has also played the tape outside the clinic but has never been cited or arrested.
“Our clients’ right to free speech is being chilled by these vague and unconstitutional ordinances. They are not disturbing the peace, nor are they desirous to break any law. They are simply Americans practicing their right to free expression,” Langdon explained. “These city laws cannot be used to silence people simply because they have a viewpoint that some consider controversial.”
The complaint filed today claims that the effect of the ordinances and the city’s actions in applying them “was to discriminate against the content of Plaintiffs’ message—Plaintiffs have had their religious and political speech suppressed, which deprived them of their constitutional right to the freedom of speech under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.”
ADF is America’s largest legal alliance defending religious liberty through strategy, training, funding, and litigation.
