High court declines case on abortion clinic zones
Also won't hear Kennedy suit on NY election rules
By: Maureen Groppe
USA Today
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Monday [02/24/2025] passed on the chance to eliminate protect-free zones at abortion clinics and also rejected Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s challenge to New York's election requirements, which has result in his removal from the ballot before the 2024 presidential election.
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The court declined to hear challenges to a law in Illinois and to a 2024 ordinance in New Jersey hat cerated a protest-free buffer zone around certain health care facilities.
..... Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito said they would have taken the cases. Anti-abortion groups, as well as a number of Republican attorneys genera, wanted the Justices to sue the challenges to overturn a 2000 decision -Hill v. Colorado - that upheld protest restrictions around abortion clinics.
..... In Hill v. Colorado, the court ruled 6-3 that Colorado could prevent activists from coming within 8 feet of another person within a 100-foot zone surrounding a health care facility.
..... The justices kept that decision intact in 2014 when it struck down a 25-foot protest-free zone outside abortion clinics in Massachusetts.
..... But the court slammed the 2000 ruling when overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022. Criticizing the effect of abortion cases on other areas of the law, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that Hill "distorted First Amendment doctrines."
..... The southern Illinois city of Carbondale saw an increase in anti-abortion protests after two reproductive health facilities opened to accommodate women from nearby states that restricted abortion after Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.
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City officials responded by passing restrictions modeled after Colorado's. But the city council repealed the ordinance in July, [2024] before anyone had been charged with violating it.
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The city's lawyers told the Supreme Court they had determined existing laws provided sufficient Protection from any "disorderly conduct."
..... In New Jersey, an anti-abortion activist represented by the American Center for Law and Justice challenged a protest-free buffer zone around certain health care facilities in Englewood.
..... The Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. circuit Court of Appeals ruled in January [2025] that the restrictions were narrowly tailored, do not violate protesters' First Amendment rights, and are less restrictive than what the Supreme Court sanctioned in 2000.
..... The Supreme court on Monday [02/24/2025] also rejected Robert F. Kennedy's second bid to overturn New York's election requirements, which has disqualified him from the 2024 ballot for claiming an invalid address.
..... The justices in September [2024] denied his request to order New York election officials to reinstate his name on the ballot even though he had suspended his campaign as an independent for president and endorsed President Donald Trump, a Republican.
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When Kennedy suspended his campaign last august, [2024] he pledged to withdraw in the most closely contested states but remain on the ballot elsewhere. Kennedy then urged his supporters everywhere to back Trump and withdrew from the ballot in a number of Republican-leaning states.
..... His fight to stay on the ballot in Democratic-leaning New York emerged after a state judge ruled in favor of a challenge by individual voters who claimed Kennedy deceptively provided a false New York residence on his petition to get on the ballot - in violation of state law - when the actually lives in California.
..... The judge agreed, calling it a "sham" address that he used "for the purpose of maintaining his voter registration and furthering his own political aspirations in this state." A state appeals court upheld the decision.