'I should never have been investigated simply for the thoughts I held in my own mind'
Only a week ago, U.K. Home Secretary Suella Braverman wrote in an open letter that "Silent prayer, within itself, is not unlawful."
And now prosecutors have agreed, dropping charges that had been filed against Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, who was arrested last March for silent prayer near an abortion business.
A report in Decision Magazine said the announcement came six months after the police investigation had begun.
She was arrested in March, and the report explained a video of her conversation with police attracted much attention.
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Officers pointed out she said she was "engaging in prayer."
And that, they charged, "is the offense."
Vaughn-Spruce is director of the U.K. March for Life.
She said in a statement released to Decision, "This isn’t 1984, but 2023. I should never have been arrested or investigated simply for the thoughts I held in my own mind."
The confrontation actually was the second time she was arrested on the novel legal concept that people can be charged criminally for what they think.
She had been arrested on the same counts in 2022, then those were dropped last winter.
The report explained, "With charges now dropped and the law seemingly clarified, Vaughan-Spruce said she plans to continue silent prayer on public sidewalks near abortion clinics."
Jeremiah Igunnubole, a lawyer for ADF UK, which worked on her case, said the process of the case was the punishment for his client.
"Moreover, her story has put the world on notice that fundamental freedoms are vulnerable in the UK," he said.
He said the hope now is that people no longer will be prosecuted for their thoughts.
See police confronting Isabel Vaughan-Spruce.
WND reported at the time that she was not protesting, or doing anything else that is prohibited, except "engaging" in silent prayer.
A commentary at The Right Scoop explained how she was being targeted because of the U.K.'s "exclusion zone" law that allows police to harass Christians who pray over the abortion industry.
The report noted, "Does this sound familiar? Biden’s DOJ has been prosecuting people for something called the FACE Act, The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. They had prosecuted Catholic Mark Houk under this Act, but he was recently found not guilty. If the leftists continue to control our government, you can bet the FACE Act will make it illegal to silently pray, just like in the UK – all in the name of baby-murder. Thankfully we have a Constitution to protect us – for now."
Charges against her stemming from the first case had been dropped, but her lawyers insisted on getting an official verdict in court, which was not guilty.
WND also has reported on the case involving Adam Smith-Connor, who faced similar claims.
IMPORTANT NOTE TO WND READERS: Believe it or not, today's high priests of climate-change apocalypse are correct in predicting that in just a few short years, the earth will become miserable, wretched and almost uninhabitable by human beings. But the grim future they envision won't come about because of "catastrophic climate change," but rather, because of the implementation of their completely insane and truly catastrophic agenda.
As Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore recently admitted, "If they actually achieve Net Zero, at least 50% of the population would die of hunger and disease." Likewise, writes energy expert and author Alex Epstein: "Today's proposed policies to rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use would, if fully implemented, have truly apocalyptic consequences – making the world an impoverished, dangerous, and miserable place for most people."
Question: When the scientific case for global warming apocalypse consists primarily of a 1-degree Celsius rise in temperature over more than 130 years, what explains the obsession with an imminent, climate-caused end of the world?
Although many groups have been drawn into the Climate Change Cult – from the news media (which has warned of climate catastrophe, either global warming or a "new ice age," for over a century!), to innocent school kids indoctrinated by hysterical leftist teachers, to liberal Democrats who claim "climate change" will destroy the earth in a few years – the REAL villains are the national and global elites who KNOW the apocalyptic global warming religion is just a cruel hoax, but promote and exploit it as a means of accomplishing their ultimate goal: Transforming and ruling the world.
The heart and soul of today's bizarre, pagan climate-change religion, and the global elites' strategies for using it to rule all of mankind, is powerfully exposed and illuminated in the September issue of WND's critically acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine, an issue titled "CULT OF THE CLIMATE APOCALYPSE: The elites' breathtaking strategy for ruling the world." WHISTLEBLOWER is available in both the popular print edition and a state-of-the-art digital version, either single issues or discounted annual subscriptions.
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