WEST BLOOMFIELD, Michigan, June 4, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) — One pro-life advocate remains in jail and another is out on bond after their arrest Friday outside a Michigan abortion center for allegedly breaching probation.
Will Goodman refused to accept bail conditions and will remain behind bars in the Oakland County Jail Annex in Michigan until his June 14 hearing.
Monica Migliorino Miller, director of Citizens for a Pro-Life Society (CPLS), accepted bail conditions so she could follow up with a woman she turned away from the abortion center before being arrested.
The woman, whose first name is Yolanda, said she was going home, but also told Miller her boyfriend wanted her to abort their child.
“I know the baby didn’t die on Friday … but her boyfriend’s pressuring her to get the abortion, so ‘go home’ means what, go back to him?” Miller told LifeSiteNews.
“I’m the one that talked to her. I gave her a rose, I prayed with her, I know why she was there for the abortion. I had a personal contact with this woman so I felt I needed to be out.”
Miller and Goodman were arrested June 1 while sidewalk counseling outside the Women’s Center of Michigan, run by abortionist Jacob Kalo at 6765 Orchard Lake Road in West Bloomfield.
They are under a probation order to stay 500 feet from every abortion center in the United States until March 2019.
They were brought before 48th District Court Magistrate Howard Linden on Friday afternoon and had no lawyer present to defend them as prosecutor Larry Sherman argued they were a threat, according to a CPLS statement released Monday.
“Only God’s law matters to these people,” Sherman told Linden, and he urged the magistrate to impose $25,000 bail and put the two on a GPS “tether” to track their whereabouts until their June 14 hearing, Miller told LifeSiteNews.
Linden imposed $2,500 bail, and the GPS monitor condition.
Miller spent Friday in jail and was released Saturday about noon with a “clunky black ankle monitor,” for which she must play a $10 daily fee.
“The world makes no sense,” she told LifeSiteNews.
“Last Saturday, the 26th of May, three people do a Red Rose Rescue” in the Washington, D.C. area, “and they get released with zero charges against them, free, totally free, scott free,” Miller said.
“We do the exact same thing in Orchard Lake, Michigan, last December, and we have the probation conditions from hell.”
Miller and Goodman were arrested December 2, 2017, along with Patrice Woodworth, Matthew Connolly, and Robert “Doc” Kovaly, after the five entered Kalo’s abortion facility with roses and offers of assistance for women in the waiting room in what is known as a Red Rose Rescue.
A six-person jury found them guilty of trespass and obstructing a police officer after a February trial presided over by 48th District Court Judge Marc Barron.
Barron, who refused to allow any reference to abortion during the trial, sentenced the five in March to a year’s reporting probation, eight days of community service and a $500 fine each.
As well as forbidding the five from going within 500 feet of any abortion center in the United States, Barron’s probation order also bans them from having contact with each other.
Their lawyer, Robert Muise of the American Freedom Law Center, appealed the convictions and also filed an emergency motion to stay Barron’s sentence.
The five have been waiting more than two months for the Appellate Court to rule on the stay of their sentences.
Miller and Goodman decided that June 1 was “time to go back to the Women’s Center and simply exercise our rights, civil and certainly God-given right to witness to the sanctity of life and reach out to the mothers going into the clinic and turn them away from abortion,” the CPLS statement said.
Miller told LifeSiteNews she didn’t expect to get arrested Friday.
She thought the abortion center staff would call the court when they realized she and Goodman were breaching the order. Instead, staff called the police and claimed the pro-lifers had trespassed on their property.
One of the police officers who responded recognized them from the December 2 arrest, and had testified at their trial, so was aware of Barron’s probation order.
Miller expected she and Goodman would appear before Barron, but such was not the case.
Nor did she expect “a tether. Who even knew such a thing existed,” she said.
“They didn’t have to stick us with this. They didn’t have to do anything, they could have let us out on our own recognizance. They could have done a thousand different things. This is absolutely incredible, what we’ve gone through for a ‘simple’ trespass case.”
An associate professor of theology at Michigan’s Madonna University, Miller was involved in the rescue movement in the 1990s, and spent some eight months in jail in total but was granted work and child care release.
“I got out of jail every day to go home and go to work,” she said.
This time around Miller admits she could be “risking her job,” and doesn’t know what’s going to happen.
Her CPLS statement is asking for prayers for all involved, including Goodman, whom Miller describes as a “pro-life missionary” and an “incredibly, incredibly spiritual person.”
“Pray for Will Goodman, who is carrying the heavy cross of incarceration, unjustly imprisoned for his defense of the unborn, locked up until at least June 14th,” it says.
CPLS asks for prayers for Yolanda, who remains under her boyfriend’s pressure to abort.
And it asks people to pray “that justice will be done for the unborn when we return to court June 14th. Pray God gives us courage to be a voice for the voiceless unborn.”
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