Man sentenced to prison for firebombing pro-life center

The Justice Department on Wednesday said that Hridindu Sankar Roychowdhury had received a seven-and-a-half-year federal prison sentence for the bombing. He pleaded guilty to the attack in December.

What happened? Roychowdhury, in May 2022, tried to set the Wisconsin Family Action Center in Madison on fire using two Molotov cocktails. He also graffitied the building with the sentence, “If abortions aren’t safe, then you aren’t either.” His attack came after a leaked opinion document surfaced for the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, suggesting the court would overturn Roe v. Wade. The court officially overturned Roe the next month.

What does Wisconsin Family Action have to say about this sentence? WFA President Christine File said in a statement that the organization was disappointed in the sentence. She called the attack an act of domestic terrorism and said the court missed a chance to protect her organization’s free speech rights more firmly. A former president of the organization, Julaine Appling, said the group had recommended the defendant receive 15 years in prison.

Dig deeper: Listen to Colin Garbarino’s report on The World and Everything in It podcast about the movie Civil War and what it says about the state of our country.