BIRMINGHAM, Ala., July 18 – It was Emily Lyons’s first chance to address Eric R. Rudolph, the bomber whose attack on an abortion clinic here in 1998 left her half-blind and maimed. And she had plenty to say.
Ms. Lyons, who had been the director of nursing at the New Woman All Women Health Care clinic, called Mr. 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 Mr. Rudolph at his sentencing Monday morning in Federal District Court, “I have more guts in my broken little finger than you have in your whole body.”
Mr. Rudolph, who pleaded guilty in April to the Birmingham bombing and three bombings in Atlanta, was sentenced to two life sentences without parole for the Birmingham bombing. Judge C. Lynwood Smith ordered him to pay $1.2 million restitution to the victims, though he acknowledged that Mr. Rudolph had no financial resources. In August, Mr. Rudolph will be sentenced to two more life terms in Atlanta for attacks on another abortion clinic and a gay club and at the 1996 Olympics.
For his part, Mr. 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 New Testament.
The four bombings injured 150 people and killed 2, Alice Hawthorne at Olympic Centennial 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 Mr. Rudolph directly.
After the sentencing, Ms. Lyons said that she had been waiting seven and a half years to speak to Mr. Rudolph, and that she was satisfied. “At least I knew he was listening,” she said.
Prosecutors had agreed not to seek the death penalty if Mr. Rudolph helped them recover more than 250 pounds of explosives he had hidden in western North Carolina, buried in the wilderness where he had taken cover while 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 hikers and scouts, made the plea agreement worthwhile. After his plea, Mr. Rudolph issued a statement in which he gloated that he had “deprived the government of its goal of sentencing me to death.”
Ms. Lyons, who has been vocal in her disappointment that Mr. Rudolph would not face capital punishment, read a seven-page statement recounting the many ways in which he had worked against himself: he saved the receipt for bombing components bought at Wal-Mart; he left explosive residue all over his trailer; he failed to notice that his intended target in Birmingham, the doctor providing abortions, did not use the clinic’s front door; he left the bomb in plain sight instead of hiding it in the bushes; he wrote the word “bomb” in the margin of his Bible; and, ultimately, he failed to stop women from obtaining abortions.
She said she believed that Mr. 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.
She also said that he owed his life to his victims’ families, most of whom agreed to the plea deal. “You murdered their loved ones, yet they kept the needle out of your arm,” she said. “Your efforts did not save you; your victims’ families did.”
“You have been and will be a parasite on society, costing us millions,” she added.
Mr. Rudolph, dressed in a red jail uniform with a long-sleeve thermal shirt underneath, 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 Judge Smith, saying she would address the court but not Mr. Rudolph. “I have nothing to say to the piece of garbage that murdered my husband,” she said.
Ms. Sanderson played a videotape of eulogists at her husband’s funeral, who remembered him keeping candy for children in his patrol car and, after responding to a call from a family whose home had been burglarized, raising money to replace their stolen Christmas gifts. She said her two sons, Mr. Sanderson’s stepsons, had been deprived of a father by Mr. Rudolph. “He has been responsible for every tear my sons have shed, and I despise him for it,” Ms. Sanderson said. “I’ve got no forgiveness for him.”
She also praised police officers in general for their daily courage, and the prosecutors for working hard to convict her husband’s killer.
“There is no punishment in my opinion great enough for Eric Rudolph, but, you know, to lock him away in supermax is a start,” Ms. Sanderson said, referring to the maximum security prison in Colorado where Mr. Rudolph will be held.
When it came time for Mr. Rudolph 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 W. Whisonant, compared Mr. Rudolph to “religious extremists who set off bombs in subways and fly airplanes into buildings.”
Judge Smith likened him to a Nazi, telling him: “You misused your gifts. You allowed yourself to be overcome and overwhelmed by bigotry and intolerance.”
