The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Thursday that an order prohibiting an anti-abortion protester from coming near a Planned Parenthood nurse violates his First Amendment right to free speech and must be overturned.
The court, chaired by Liberals in a 4-3 vote, unanimously ruled that the warrant should be withdrawn.
A Trempealeu County judge in 2020 banned Brian Aish from going near nurse Nancy Kindschy, who sometimes worked at a small family planning clinic in the western Wisconsin town of Blair. Kindschy said Aish threatened her, saying bad things would happen to her or her family if she didn’t quit her job.
Aish had argued that his comments, made from a public sidewalk, were protected by freedom of speech under the First Amendment. The Wisconsin Supreme Court agreed.
Aish regularly protested at the clinic between 2014 and 2019, mainly by holding up signs with Bible verses and preaching his Christian and anti-abortion beliefs, the court ruling said. But starting in 2019, Aish began directing his comments at Kindschy, bombarding her with messages she found threatening.
In October 2019, Aish said Kindschy had time to repent and that “it won’t be long before bad things happen to you and your family” and that “you could be killed by a drunk driver tonight,” according to the court.
A Trempealeu County judge issued a four-year injunction prohibiting Aish from coming near Kindschy. Aish appealed. A state appeals court upheld the injunction against Aish in 2022, but the state Supreme Court on Thursday ordered it dismissed.
While the Wisconsin case was still ongoing, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in 2023 that made it more difficult to convict someone of making a violent threat. That case involved a Colorado man who was convicted of stalking a musician.
In that case, the country’s Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors must prove that “the suspect had a subjective awareness of the threatening nature of his statements” and that “the suspect consciously failed to take into account the significant risk that his statements would be construed as threatening acts of violence.”
The Wisconsin Supreme Court cited that statement in its ruling Thursday. According to the court, the lower court had not found that Aish had ‘consciously failed to take into account a substantial risk that his communication would be interpreted as a threat of violence’.
“Aish’s statements could not have amounted to actual threats of violence because he denied that he intended to have Kindschy harmed,” Justice Rebecca Bradley wrote in a separate ruling, agreeing with the majority opinion of Justice Rebecca Dallet.
Aish’s attorney, Joan Mannix of the Thomas More Society, said in a statement that the ruling “affirms that the First Amendment protects free speech, even unpopular or disapproved speech — a fact that is often overlooked in this age of partisan politics.”
Kindschy has now retired and the clinic where she worked has closed.
