White Plains, NY - Westchester County wants to jail pro-life sidewalk counselors for months or even a whole year—not for blocking anyone, not for threatening anyone, but for failing to read minds.

Under a 2022 county law, it is a crime to continue speaking to someone outside an abortion facility after they make an “implied request to cease.” The law demands that sidewalk counselors somehow detect a listener’s unspoken thoughts—or face criminal prosecution and jail time.

Thomas More Society has filed an opening brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit challenging this unprecedented restriction on pro-life speech.

The County’s own lawyers have proven unable to define the standard they are asking courts to enforce. During prior proceedings, County counsel conceded that someone merely “walking around” a sidewalk counselor could constitute an implied request to stop speaking—and that a “blank stare” presents a “close question.” Taking just “a few steps” alongside another person could even qualify as criminal “following.” The law also criminalizes speech that “alarms or seriously annoys” another, without explaining what that means.

Faced with those interpretations, longtime sidewalk counselors Regina Molinelli and Oksana Hulinsky have been forced to cease sidewalk counseling entirely. They no longer offer literature, engage in conversation, or even appear on the sidewalks where they once spent years offering hope to women. Hulinsky now just sits in her car outside the clinic and prays.

“This law turns ordinary conversation into a guessing game with jail time, financial ruin and the potential loss of preborn life as the penalty,” said Christopher Ferrara, Senior Counsel at Thomas More Society. “The Constitution does not permit the government to criminalize speech based on silence, body language, or a listener’s unexpressed thoughts. Pro-life sidewalk advocates are peaceful, compassionate, and perhaps persistent—but they are not the mind readers Westchester County demands they be.”

The appeal also exposes the absence of any factual basis for the law. Westchester County has been unable to identify a single instance—before or after the law’s passage—of unlawful harassment by pro-life advocates on public sidewalks in the County. The only incident cited by legislators involved a trespass, which is already prohibited by existing law and unrelated to speech on a public sidewalk.

Despite this absence of evidence, the County pressed forward with a sweeping criminal ban explicitly targeting sidewalk counseling, according to the law’s own legislative memo—relying on a Second Circuit decision that Thomas More Society itself had already successfully overturned.

“Nobody should be muzzled simply for attempting to offer information about alternatives to abortion and ignoring a so-called 'implied request to cease,’” said Michael McHale, Senior Counsel at Thomas More Society.“Our country was founded on the importance of the free exchange of ideas on public sidewalks that others at first might find uncomfortable or ‘annoying.’ Westchester County’s resort to censorship only confirms the power and truth of our clients’ message—and the importance of winning this appeal.”

Last year, Hulinsky, Molinelli, and other sidewalk counselors represented by Thomas More Society, won a federal court ruling that another portion of the same Westchester law “criminalized large swaths of protected speech” in violation of the First Amendment. But the court declined to strike down the ‘implied request to cease’ provision. Thomas More Society now asks the Second Circuit to invalidate it.

Read the Opening Brief in Hulinsky, et al. v. Westchester County, et al., filed by Thomas More Society attorneys in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.