Pro-life protestors win appeal in lawsuit alleging they caused emotional distress, nuisance

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – Three pro-life protestors who held up pictures of aborted babies outside a school in Washington DC have won their appeal in a suit filed by the school alleging they had inflicted emotional distress (IIED) and caused a private nuisance, Christian Headlines (CH) reports.

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals reversed a lower court’s decision in favor of the school.

The three appellants in the case are pro-life counselors who, on at least four occasions, stood outside DC’s Two Rivers Public Charter School with the pictures, handed out anti-abortion leaflets, and spoke to students and parents entering the school. Of particular concern to the protestors is the fact the school is located next to a Planned Parenthood abortion facility that was being built, CH reports.

Two Rivers filed suit, claiming the protestors had “prevented administrators and teachers from being able to plan for the school day, forced them to make ‘extraordinary efforts’ to protect students, inhibited the ‘core educational goals of the school,’ and threatened the charter school’s funding, which depends on enrollment,” CH reports.

Remanding the case back to the lower court for dismissal, on Thursday the three-judge court unanimously ruled the school did not have the legal standing to file the suit, and that the students should have filed it instead.

“[T]he trial court erred in holding that Two Rivers had demonstrated it was likely to succeed on the merits,” the court of appeals ruled.

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