FIRST ON FOX: When Joan Bell, 76, was given the information she was one of many pro-life activists pardoned by President Donald Trump Thursday afternoon, she was in disbelief.
“I didn’t know if that meant we would get out in a few weeks or a few months, or what. I didn’t really know, but I knew we got pardoned,” Bell, a grandmother of eight, instructed Fox Information Digital Friday. “Well, then I ran upstairs because I had a rosary every evening.”
After ending her prayers and Bible examine with different inmates, Bell, a lifelong pro-life advocate, was instructed by a number of different inmates that her husband, Christopher Bell, was on Laura Ingraham’s Fox Information present saying she was certainly one of many 23 others pardoned.
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President Donald Trump pardoned 23 pro-life activists Thursday. (Getty/Christopher Bell)
“That was overwhelmingly beautiful,” Bell recalled. “Everyone was clapping.” She was then instructed by a guard to pack up her issues for her launch later that night.
“We are so grateful to Trump. And to just feel the fresh air, God’s beautiful air, just wonderful,” Bell stated. “Just being out and being with my husband, my son, just glorious. There are no words to describe that kind of freedom.”
She added that she and her husband will take a “second honeymoon” quickly.
Bell, who lives in New Jersey, was sentenced to greater than two years in jail in November 2023 for taking part in a “blockade,” conspiring with different activists at a Washington D.C. abortion clinic in October 2020, in line with President Biden’s Division of Justice (DOJ).
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Joan Bell, 76, (heart), is pictured together with her church group and husband Christopher Bell after President Donald Trump pardoned her and 22 others Thursday. (Christopher Bell)
Prosecutors from the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and U.S. lawyer’s workplace for the District of Columbia argued the pro-life activists violated the 1994 FACE Act, a federal regulation that prohibits bodily drive, threats of drive or deliberately damaging property to stop somebody from acquiring or offering abortion companies.
The activists had been sentenced by Choose Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Courtroom for the District of Columbia, a Clinton appointee, and instantly detained.
Whereas signing the pardons Thursday, only a day earlier than Friday’s annual March for Life rally, Trump stated, “They should not have been prosecuted.”
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“Many, many of them are elderly people,” Trump stated within the Oval Workplace. “They should not have been prosecuted. This is a great honor to sign this. They’ll be very happy.”
Bell, together with Paula Paulette Harlow, Jean Marshall and John Hinshaw, had been throughout 70 years outdated once they had been imprisoned.
“That he personally knew our case is so touching,” Bell stated of Trump. “I want to give him a hug.”
Attorneys from the Thomas Extra Society formally requested pardons from the Trump administration earlier this month for the 21 pro-life advocates the regulation agency was representing.
President Donald Trump indicators paperwork as he points government orders and pardons for Jan. 6 defendants within the Oval Workplace on the White Home on Inauguration Day in Washington Jan. 20, 2025. (Reuters/Carlos Barria)
“The heroic peaceful pro-lifers unjustly imprisoned by Biden’s Justice Department will now be freed and able to return home to their families, eat a family meal and enjoy the freedom that should have never been taken from them in the first place,” Steve Crampton, senior counsel of the Thomas Extra Society, stated in an announcement.
“These heroic peaceful pro-lifers were treated shamefully by Biden’s DOJ, with many of them branded felons and losing many rights that we take for granted as American citizens.”
In a earlier interview with Fox Information Digital, Crampton stated it was onerous to discover a “fair jury” and that many of the jurors had been both Deliberate Parenthood donors or pro-choice advocates within the circumstances. He referred to as Washington, D.C., the “most pro-abortion city in America.”
“She can say her pro-death words, but we weren’t allowed to say pro-life words,” Bell stated of the choose within the trial. Nonetheless, she stated it was extra “heartbreaking” to be prosecuted for her non secular beliefs.
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This week, Trump additionally took motion to pardon over 1,000 Jan. 6 rioters who had been imprisoned, together with quite a few different government orders associated to immigration and cryptocurrency and orders to declassify the MLK and JFK recordsdata.
Fox Information Digital has reached out to the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division for remark.
