CV NEWS FEED // The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Thursday that an order barring a pro-life protester from coming close to a Planned Parenthood nurse to protest violated his First Amendment free speech rights and must be overturned.
Thomas More Society attorneys, representing pro-life advocate Brian Aish, achieved the unanimous victory, successfully overturning a previous court order that had barred Aish from approaching Planned Parenthood nurse Nancy Kindschy.
In 2020, a Trempealeu County judge barred Aish from being near Kindschy, who worked in an abortion clinic in the western Wisconsin city of Blair.
According to Associated Press, Aish reportedly told Kindschy that bad things would happen to her or her family if she didn’t quit her job.
The Trempealeu County judge consequently issued a four-year injunction barring Aish from approaching Kindschy, due to claims that Kindschy found Aish’s remarks to be “threatening”, and ruling that the injunction therefore did not run afoul of First Amendment speech protections.
Aish appealed, contending that his remarks, made from a public sidewalk, were never a threat of exercising violence, and were protected by the First Amendment as free speech.
In 2022, Thomas More Society attorneys argued that the case did not involve any “true threat,” a category of speech not protected under the First Amendment, but the court upheld the injunction.
The case was re-argued in 2024 to address the U.S. Supreme Court’s precedent-setting 2023 ruling in Counterman v. Colorado. In Counterman, the Supreme Court clarified that a speaker must act recklessly regarding whether their words will be perceived as a “true threat.”
Thomas More Society attorneys successfully demonstrated, and the Wisconsin Supreme Court found, that without any findings meeting this requirement, the injunction prohibiting Aish’s speech could not be upheld.
According to the Thomas More Society, Justice Rebecca Bradley, concurring in the judgment, noted that “An unconstitutional injunction impermissibly infringed Aish’s fundamental First Amendment right to speak freely on ‘a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views,’” Justice Bradley added.
Thomas More Society attorney Joan Mannix said in a statement that the ruling “reaffirms that the First Amendment protects speech, even unpopular or disfavored speech — a fact that is often lost in these partisan times.”
