Lauren Handy, the pro-life activist sentenced to almost five years in prison for protesting at a Washington, D.C., abortion clinic, is a victim of the Biden administration’s weaponization of the Department of Justice, Peter Breen, an attorney with the Thomas More Society, which represented her in the case, told Newsmax.

“In the wake of over 100 fire bombings and vandalism and incidents at pro-life churches and pregnancy centers, he’s instead going after peaceful pro-life advocates like Lauren Handy,” Breen said in an interview on Newsmax’s “Greg Kelly Reports” Thursday. 

Handy and the other protesters, he added, were “engaged in civil disobedience, which is something we have a long tradition of in America, peaceful civil disobedience.”

There are “so many examples” of others engaging in such protests where nothing has been done, but with Hardy, as the incident occurred at an abortion clinic, “the Biden administration, government decided to throw the book at these folks,” he said.

Handy was convicted by a federal jury in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 29 of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE).

The Clinton-era law, passed in 1994, prohibits threats to and obstruction of a person seeking reproductive health services or providers.

U.S. Senior District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly sentenced her this week to 57 months in federal prison, with credit for almost nine months served.

Federal prosecutors said the defendants allegedly violated federal law by using chains, bike locks, and ropes to block the Washington Surgi-Clinic on Oct. 22, 2020, but Breen said Handy and her fellow co-defendants had blocked doors and staged a “sit-in.”

“It’s something that the civil rights folks used to do,” said Breen. “It’s a misdemeanor that you slap on the wrist and you send folks home. It is not a crime where you send someone to a federal penitentiary for almost five years.”

Even a violation for blocking access to an abortion clinic would ordinarily bring a sentence of six months to a year in prison, Breen added, but the Biden administration made the charges into a conspiracy against rights, which would carry a 10-year maximum sentence.

Breen said the Thomas More Society is hoping to get Hardy’s conviction overturned and the sentence reversed. 

“Five years in a federal penitentiary. I mean, you’ve got to do very serious things to people or cause grievous bodily harm to get that much of a sentence,” Breen said. “But these folks did not. And I’ll tell you, they just … they’re so peaceful. They are loving people.”

The clinic where the protests occurred, he added, “is one of the worst abortion facilities in the country, so they very much deserve to be picketed.”

Handy is a “trouper,” though, said Breen.

“None of us expected when she walked in there to get a five-year federal prison sentence,” said Breen, but he said she is spending her time behind bars ministering to the other inmates. 

“She’s doing this for a greater cause, for the cause of those little children who were killed and for their mothers who are deceived and duped, often coerced or forced into that decision,” he said.

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