California Gov. Gavin Newsom said last week that he will not honor Louisiana’s request to extradite a California doctor accused of mailing abortion pills into Louisiana, escalating a legal fight between two states with sharply different abortion laws.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill has identified the doctor as Dr. Remy Coeytaux, a San Francisco Bay Area physician charged in St. Tammany Parish with “criminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs.”
The charge carries a potential sentence of up to 50 years in prison, according to Murrill.
California is one of 22 states that has enacted “shield laws,” which are measures designed to protect healthcare providers and patients from out-of-state investigations, extradition requests and other legal penalties for reproductive care that is lawful within their borders.
Ethan Vogin, an LSU law student and College Council president at the Paul M. Herbert Law Center, said the conflict reflects a basic feature of American federalism: that states can take different approaches to public policy.
“There’s a constitutional theory called the laboratories of democracy,” Vogin said. “All 50 states have the ability to experiment with social policy.”
States like California and New York have adopted shield laws in support of abortion rights after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
“If I were to take a high-capacity magazine and knowingly ship it to California, I would be violating California law. The people of California have an expectation that when their criminal laws are broken, the suspects will be held accountable in a court of law,” Vogin said.
To understand what could happen next, LSU Law Professor John Devlin said the key question is whether extradition rules apply when the accused never “fled” the state seeking to prosecute them.
“The question would be, how broadly is the Puerto Rico v. Branstad case going to be interpreted,” he said, referring to a 1987 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving interstate extradition.
“Louisiana would have to take some action, presumably in federal court,” Vogin said. He clarified that any case would turn on the underlying facts, including whether the doctor was ever in Louisiana.
“Until Louisiana brings some action, I don’t think anything’s going to happen,” he said.
If Louisiana escalates the standoff, Devlin said the fight could land in federal court as “Louisiana v. California,” asking a judge to order California comply with the extradition request.
A previous version of this story misspelled the last name of Ethan Vogin as Vogen.
