Pro-Life Youth Arrested for Distributing Literature on Public Sidewalk

March 9, 2012

Two college-age members of the pro-life organization Survivors Campus Life Tour were arrested March 6 outside Murrah High School in Jackson, Miss., while distributing literature to students on a public sidewalk in front of the campus, the Christian Newswire reports. The group of pro-life youth activists first attempted on March 5 to hold signs and talk to students on the sidewalk, but school police confronted them, moved their signs across the street, sequestered students back inside school grounds and ordered students not to speak to the demonstrators. The police said the sidewalk belonged to the school -- though it was being used at the same time by passersby and joggers -- and that they had the right to remove the Campus Life team. After conferring with attorneys from the Life Legal Defense Fund, the activists returned to the sidewalk the next day, and when police ordered them to leave or go to jail, Kristina Garza and Brianna Baxter remained and were immediately arrested. The Life Legal Defense Foundation is working to defend the young women, vowing that "everyone involved in the miscarriage of justice will be held accountable for their misdeeds."