‘By One Man’s Signature’: Pro-Life Defendants Reunite A Year After Conviction To Celebrate Pardons

LENOIR CITY, Tenn.—Nearly a year after a Nashville jury convicted them on federal conspiracy charges over a peaceful pro-life protest, a group of pro-life Christians reunited to celebrate their pardons from President Donald Trump, recount their time in prison, and encourage each other in the fight against abortion. 

In the year since they had last all been together, two had gone to prison, one was slated to go to prison, and the rest were restricted from traveling, owning guns, and voting. But thanks to Trump’s January 23 pardons of the nearly two dozen pro-lifers targeted by the Biden administration, 10 of the pardoned traveled last week for a reunion at the Patriot Church, just outside of Knoxville. 

Those pardoned who made the trek to East Tennessee included Paul Vaughn, Coleman Boyd, Dennis Green, Chet Gallagher, Heather Idoni, and Cal Zastrow, all of whom were convicted on felony conspiracy charges in January 2024 over a sit-in at a now-closed Mt. Juliet, Tennessee abortion facility. Each of them had faced over a decade in prison, with Zastrow getting six months, Gallagaher 16 months, and Idoni eight months to run concurrently with her two year sentence over a similar protest in Washington, D.C. 

Other pardoned pro-lifers in attendance at the reunion were Paul Place, Eva Edl, and Eva Zastrow, who were convicted on a lesser Freedom of Access To Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act charge in Nashville; and Justin Phillips, who was convicted in August on conspiracy charges over a pro-life protest at a Michigan abortion facility.

Steven Lefemine, who spent 60 days in prison after sitting in front of the door to a South Carolina abortion facility, also was in attendance. He did not apply for a pardon because he wanted to continue to fight the FACE Act, which he says is unconstitutional. 

This reunion featured a potluck dinner, Christian worship songs, and testimonies from the pardoned pro-lifers.  

“I was in prison. I’m out of prison. Just like that. By one man’s signature. By a declaration that way. I was pardoned from prison by the president of the United States,” Zastrow said on Wednesday as he spoke to a cheering crowd at the Patriot Church while holding up a copy of his pardon.

Zastrow, who was imprisoned in Thomson Federal Correctional Institute in Illinois, said that he didn’t expect to be pardoned based on his experience with previous politicians. 

“I’ve helped other guys run for office and I just quit believing that when people promise what they’re going do when they’re elected,” Zastrow said. “So I don’t have real high expectations when somebody says they’re going to do something when they’re running for office.” 

He thanked the crowd for their letters and phone calls to his wife, saying that “God used your lobbying for a pardon.”

He added that he wasn’t afraid of prison because of his faith. 

“It’s because I just get so close to Jesus, I press in so close to Jesus and I just receive and accept his love for me and I just channel that out to other people,” he said. 

He recounted several stories from prison, including one involving a prison guard whom he said used to swear at the prisoners when they were in line for food. Zastrow said that one day the guard took God’s name in vain, and he responded by saying “praise your name oh Jesus,” after which the prisoners standing around him backed away from him because, he said, no one ever talked while they were in line for food. Everyone stopped for a moment before Zastrow said that the prison guard responded by saying, “Amen.”

“That was the last time he ever swore at us and took the Lord’s name in vain,” he said. 

Heather Idoni, another one of those who was freed from prison, also spoke about how prison gave her an opportunity to share her faith, joking that she had a “captive audience for the Gospel.” 

“Prison is the best federally-funded mission trip you can go on. Everywhere I went, there were women hungry for the Lord,” she said. “They didn’t, some didn’t know it yet. Do you know what I got to tell them? I got to say, ‘I’ve been praying for you for two years now and I didn’t even know who you were yet.’”

Idoni, who was convicted on FACE Act and felony conspiracy charges in Nashville, Detroit, and D.C., had been imprisoned since the summer of 2023, before she was freed in January. She previously spoke about how she was shuttled from prison to prison, exacerbating some of her health challenges. 

“God was keeping me every day, his peace, his presence, not one day without it,” she said. 

Both Idoni and Zastrow met new grandchildren for the first time when they were released from prison. 

The final pardoned pro-lifer to speak was 89-year-old Eva Edl, who spoke about her experience surviving a communist prison camp in Yugoslavia as a young girl. Edl said that witnessing Nazis targeting Jews and the communists targeting her people group because of their ethnic heritage motivated her to fight the dehumanization of the unborn.

Both of her parents were taken prisoner during World War II, and she was sent to a prison camp at the age of nine.

“The Nazis had taken my daddy. The Russians had taken my mother and my grandfather to dig trenches on the Russian side,” she said. 

She was shipped in a cattle car to the camp and nearly died of starvation while she was mistreated horrifically by the prison guards, saying that “people were eating rats and rats were eating people.”

During her time in prison, she said that she got her hands on a Christian prayer book, which was “more important to me than the food itself that I was craving.”  

“When you have that closeness and that peace, you lose the fear of anything else,” she said. 

Edl, her mother, brother, and sister eventually escaped to Austria before immigrating to America in the 1950s. Witnessing the horrific way that people were demonized motivated Edl to become outspokenly pro-life, and she began engaging in sit-ins at abortion facilities around the country. 

When pardoned, she was facing sentencing for a felony conspiracy charge after she sat outside an abortion facility in Sterling Heights, Michigan in 2020. She could have been sentenced to over a decade in federal prison before receiving a pardon from Trump.

Edl closed her testimony by urging churches to encourage adoption and support women in crisis pregnancies. She said she always wished that someone had stood up for her back when she was thrown into the prison camp, and that people should stand up for the unborn today.

She turns 90 in May and is determined as ever to fight for the unborn. 

While they’ve been pardoned, the shakeout of the Biden pro-life prosecutions are still being played out in court, as lawyers for the defendants are attempting to present arguments that the FACE Act should be ruled unconstitutional and voided.