SAGINAW, Michigan (LifeSiteNews) — A judge on Friday dismissed a felony charge against a Michigan abortionist who allegedly struck a pro-life activist with his vehicle earlier this year, causing him to suffer a broken leg. The attorney for the pro-life advocate told LifeSiteNews he plans to bring the charge again.
On Friday, a Saginaw County judge dismissed the case against 88-year-old abortionist Theodore Roumell, who was charged with felonious assault for running into pro-life activist Mark Zimmerman in the driveway of the Women’s Center of Saginaw on Friday, June 23.
Zimmerman told LifeSiteNews at the time he had been outside the abortion facility with about five other pro-life Christians to “share the Gospel and also offer physical help” to abortion-seeking women, as well as to plead with the abortionists not to kill babies.
He said he began to walk across the driveway to the clinic just as Roumell started to pull in, “faster than normal,” at which time Roumell ran into him with his vehicle, driving over his knee before backing up.
READ: Michigan pro-life activist set for surgery after abortionist allegedly struck him with his car
On Friday, a district court held a preliminary hearing to consider the evidence in the case. Both Zimmerman and Roumell were in attendance, and Zimmerman testified that he had been “stunned” and “trying to get out of the way” of Roumell’s car as the abortionist drove toward him, a local ABC affiliate reported.
Video footage played during the hearing shows Zimmerman standing in the middle of the driveway and then gradually walking backwards across the road in front of Roumell’s car as the abortionist continued to slowly drive forward, ultimately striking Zimmerman and running over him with his left front wheel.
Roumell’s attorney told the court that Zimmerman had been intentionally blocking the driveway in violation of state and federal law.
On Monday, Zimmerman’s attorney Robert Dunn told LifeSiteNews that the case was scrapped in the preliminary hearing because “the district judge, after hearing the evidence, dismissed the case on the grounds that the evidence was insufficient.”
The attorney, who said he wasn’t present in court on Friday, said it’s unusual for a case to be dropped in a preliminary hearing when the alleged victim testifies, since “credibility issues are for a jury in circuit court at the trial, not for the district judge in ruling at a preliminary hearing.”
He said he thinks the judge must not have seen the evidence he had compiled to support the case, including “signed witness statements… that the doctor had threatened to do this recently and then did it, and that there was a prior case at least ten years ago where he did this to somebody else.”
As LifeSiteNews previously reported, one of Zimmerman’s fellow sidewalk counselors said in June that Roumell had previously threatened to hit the pro-life activists. He said that he and other pro-lifers mentioned the prior threat when they made statements to law enforcement at the scene.
Roumell was also charged with assault in 2012 after he allegedly attempted to hit Lynn Mills, director of Pro-Life Michigan, with the door of his car.
READ: Pro-lifer files assault charges against abortionist
“All of this evidence could have been brought forth,” Dunn said. “I don’t know if any of it was. I have to believe it wasn’t, because if it was, there’s no possible way the judge could have dismissed the charge.”
Dunn said he is going to work to get the felony assault charge brought back or appeal the district judge’s decision to the circuit court.
He also intends to file a lawsuit against Roumell and the abortion facility, seeking civil damages for alleged gross negligence, as well as intentional conduct, assault, battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
According to Dunn, who also represented pro-life rescuer Heather Idoni in the first of two back-to-back Washington D.C. trials against a group of pro-lifers accused of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act for blocking entry to a late-term abortion facility, argued that the current judicial system is skewed in favor of progressives, who “have the power nationally right now.”
Dunn said Idoni, who was convicted along with her colleagues and immediately incarcerated, “did not get a fair trial.”
As LifeSiteNews extensively reported, D.C. federal judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly forbade defense attorneys from using words like “infanticide,” “abortion,” or “innocent lives,” did not strike potential jurors for cause even though they admitted to being pro-abortion, and refused to permit defense attorneys to show the jury a video of D.C. abortionist Cesare Santangelo admitting he would not undertake extraordinary means to help an unwanted baby survive if that baby was born while scheduled for an abortion (though defendant Lauren Handy testified that her activism was inspired in part by viewing the 2013 undercover investigative video).
READ: Pro-life rescuers immediately incarcerated following jury’s guilty verdict in DC FACE Act trial
“It’s just unbelievable. Nobody had a chance,” Dunn said, adding that his motion for the revocation of bond for Idoni has been denied.
“These events are happening more and more because people know they can get away with it,” he said. “They know nothing will be done. Very little will be done.”
“Progressives are in charge of the federal government and they don’t like to give up power,” the attorney continued.
Among the biggest threats to that power, Dunn suggested, are people of faith.
According to the attorney, Christians make up a “huge group that stands in the way of progressives having their total control and domination of our country.”