Birmingham, Ala. – It was Emily Lyons’ first chance to address Eric Rudolph, the bomber whose attack on an abortion clinic here in 1998 left her half-blind and maimed. And she had plenty to say.
Lyons, who had been the director of nursing at the New Woman All Women Health Care clinic, called Rudolph a coward for making a plea deal to avoid the death penalty, and said, pointedly, that the clinics he bombed were still in operation today and that his attack had transformed her into a public figure who had raised thousands of dollars for abortion services.
And she told Rudolph at his sentencing in U.S. District Court on Monday morning, “I have more guts in my broken little finger than you have in your whole body.”
Rudolph, who pleaded guilty in April to the Birmingham bombing and three Atlanta bombings, was sentenced to two life sentences without parole for the Birmingham bombing. Judge Lynwood Smith ordered him to pay $1.2 million restitution to the victims, though he acknowledged Ru dolph had no financial resources.
In August, he will be sentenced to two more life terms in Atlanta for attacks on another abortion clinic, a gay club and a crowded park at the 1996 Olympics.
For his part, Rudolph remained unrepentant in his first extended public remarks since his arrest after five years as a fugitive, calling violence against abortion providers “a moral duty.”
“As I go to a prison cell for a lifetime, I know that ‘I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith,”‘ he said, quoting from the Bible.
The four bombings injured 150 people and killed two, Alice Hawthorne at the Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta and Robert Sanderson, an off-duty police officer, in Birmingham. Monday was the first time victims or their family members could confront Rudolph directly.
After the sentencing, Lyons said she had been waiting 7 1/2 years to speak to Rudolph, and she was satisfied.
“At least I knew he was listening,” she said.
Prosecutors had agreed not to seek the death penalty if Ru dolph helped them recover more than 250 pounds of explosives he had hidden in western North Carolina, buried in the wilderness where he had been in hiding. Officials announced the deal in April, after law-enforcement agents recovered the explosives.
Prosecutors have said that finding the explosives, which could have been a danger to recreationists, made the plea agreement worthwhile.
After his plea, Rudolph issued a statement in which he gloated that he had “deprived the government of its goal of sentencing me to death.”
Lyons, who has been vocal in her disappointment that Ru dolph would not face capital punishment, read a seven-page statement in which she said she believed that Rudolph had used abortion as an excuse to kill.
“What makes you think you have been appointed to rule every woman in the United States?” she asked.
Rudolph listened to her attentively, sometimes nodding as if in agreement and sometimes shaking his head.
Felecia Sanderson, the widow of the police officer killed in the bombing, has rarely spoken publicly about the bombings. But she stood before Smith, saying she would address the court but not Rudolph.
“I have nothing to say to the piece of garbage that murdered my husband,” she said.
She said her two sons, Sanderson’s stepsons, had been deprived of a father by Rudolph.
“He has been responsible for every tear my sons have shed, and I despise him for it,” Sanderson said. “I’ve got no forgiveness for him.
“There is no punishment in my opinion great enough for Eric Rudolph, but you know, to lock him away in Supermax is a start,” Sanderson said, referring to the maximum-security prison in Florence, Colo., where Ru dolph will be held.
When it came time for Ru dolph to speak, he likened abortion to infanticide and said its legalization made the state “the handmaiden of the new hedonism.”
An “abortion mill,” he said, was the “vomitorium of modernity.”
“Those who attempt to save the lives of unborn children and who wish to promote a culture that respects life are now treated as fanatics, threats to American freedom,” he said.
The prosecutor, Michael Whisonant, compared Rudolph to “religious extremists who set off bombs in subways and fly airplanes into buildings.”
Smith likened him to a Nazi, telling him: “You misused your gifts. You allowed yourself to be overcome and overwhelmed by bigotry and intolerance.”