Linda Gibbons’s legal odyssey has taken a different turn, as she has been charged with disobeying a court order after appearing outside the Scott “Clinic” abortion site in downtown Toronto on Oct. 8.

It has been the local Crown attorney office’s practice to charge Gibbons with obstructing a peace officer throughout the 14-year term of a “temporary” court injunction that prohibits pro-life activity within 20 metres of the Scott site. However, on Sept. 30, Justice S. Ford Clements ruled that Gibbons’s silent, peaceful and acquiescent conduct with police in an earlier incident could not be interpreted as obstructing a peace officer and thereupon acquitted her of the charge.

Pro-life activists have long believed the tactic of laying an inappropriate charge upon Gibbons has been a device to deny her both a jury trial and the opportunity to challenge the injunction constitutionally. That may change, however, with the latest development.

In the earlier case, Clements echoed the sentiments of Judge Milton Cadsby who, a decade previously, had ruled that the late Ken Campbell had not obstructed a peace officer in a similar matter. Cadsby had also urged that the injunction – then only four years old – needed to be reviewed.

“Today’s victory makes it unlikely that the Crown can continue to follow its underhanded strategy of avoiding challenges to the ‘temporary’ injunction by charging peaceful protesters not resisting arrest with the bogus charge of ‘obstructing a police officer’ or any other bogus charge,” LifeSite News predicted at the time.

History proved that prediction to be incorrect, however, at least in the short term, as the Crown continued its questionable practice for another decade. But after Clements noted that it takes more than the refusal of a verbal police order to make one guilty of obstructing a peace officer, the Crown attorney’s office seemed to have realized that its bluff had been called.

During her brief period of freedom, Gibbons told The Interim that conditions – such as noise levels and food – were much better for her at the Vanier Centre for Women in Milton as compared to her previous facility at the Metro West Detention Centre. It wasn’t uncommon for her to suffer migraine headaches and a weight loss of 5 kilograms over a two-month period at the latter site, she said.

On the other hand, Vanier is still far from a resort, with brawls occasionally breaking out among female prisoners and lockdowns of her range occurring, she said. Happily, she reported saving a baby’s life behind bars when a fellow inmate was exposed to a pro-life pamphlet she had been sent.

Gibbons was pointed about the injustice of the court injunction. “It was abuse of process ? it absolutely is political manipulation. The whole principle is that radical feminists are using the levers of the law to impose their agenda. We need to resist it.”

She added the suggestion that there is social peace on abortion is “an illusion, a mirage.” The pro-life movement has “got the goods and the flesh and blood evidence” in the form of saved babies, she said, noting that all the pro-abortion faction has to work with is empty rhetoric.

“The babies we save will survive us,” she said.

Gibbons was scheduled to appear in court in Toronto on Oct. 23.