Judge delivers 1st Amendment victory protecting communications of pro-life organization

A federal judge in Idaho has delivered an order protecting the private communications of a pro-life organization that was hit with a subpoena for that information even though it was not party to a lawsuit brought against the state by a group of abortion promoters.

It was the Northwest Abortion Access Fund, the Indigenous Idaho Alliance and others who had been in court demanding access to the communications of the Right to Life of Idaho, Inc.

Magistrate Judge Debora Grasham quashed, or canceled, the subpoena, determining that the abortionists’ insistence on the subpoena because it would help them overcome “inefficiency, cost, scope, and timing,” could not “justify infringement on the First Amendment rights asserted at this time.”

“The First Amendment does not magically cease to exist in civil litigation discovery,” explained James Bopp Jr., of the Bopp Law Firm which represents RTLI.

“The court correctly recognized that a party cannot overcome its protections of speech and association by simply filing a lawsuit—particularly when that party has not even tried to take simple, reasonable steps to obtain the discovery in a manner that does not implicate the First Amendment at all. The court correctly stopped the plaintiffs’ attempt to force RTLI, their ideological opponent, to hand over its private communications.”

The case involved is Matsumoto v. Labrado, in which abortion interests are contesting an Idaho law that bars the trafficking of minors for abortion.

Even though Right to Life was not part of the legal case, the pro-abortion activists had targeted the organization with a subpoena last fall, “attempting to dig through RTLI’s communications and records. The subpoena demanded that RTLI, which was not even a party to the case, provide years’ worth of its communications with legislators concerning Idaho House Bills 242 and 98.”

The Right to Life group, “whose chief purpose and strategy relies on its ability to communicate freely with legislators,” warned an order supporting the subpoena “would certainly inflict direct harm on its ability to engage in such speech and association.”

The organization said lawmakers would be less inclined to communicate with RTLI if those communications could be demanded on a whim any time pro-abortion groups filed a lawsuit.

The court’s decision found that the First Amendment rights of the Right to Life group were at stake.

RTLI confirmed, “The court also found that the plaintiffs had not established a need for the documents sufficient to overcome the First Amendment’s protections. Indeed, binding Ninth Circuit precedent plainly requires a party seeking such discovery to obtain it, if possible, from sources that do not implicate the First Amendment—yet the plaintiffs had not even attempted the simple step of lodging a request under Idaho’s robust public records law before dragging RTLI into court. Accordingly, the court declined to enforce the subpoena.”

The court said that, “the rights to freedom of speech and association are important core First Amendment interests.”

The judge confirmed that the abortion interests had not demonstrated that “compelled discovery” is the least restrictive means of obtaining that information.

“Given the significance of the First Amendment rights, the Court finds, on balance, that Plaintiffs’ interests in obtaining the information through discovery before pursuing other less intrusive means, such as a public records request, are now outweighed by the First Amendment rights asserted. ”