Pro-abortion fanatics have been trying to get David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt put in prison for making tapes of Planned Parenthood employees joking about their grisly business and talking about selling the organs of their victims.
The state of California has cooperated with this attempted persecution by filing 15 felony charges against the pair, mostly having to do with recording people’s private conversations against their permission. But the San Francisco Superior Court has thrown out 14 of those charges.
The one charge that remains has to do with their posing as someone they are not, a tactic commonly used by investigative journalists. The Los Angeles Times, seeing the threat to the freedom of the press, is supporting Daleiden and Merritt, despite the newspaper’s support of abortion.
From Charlotte Allen, Court Dismisses Charges Against Pro-Life Activists, For Now | The Weekly Standard:
Even in famously abortion-friendly California there is justice for abortion foes. On June 21, the San Francisco County Superior Court threw out 14 of the 15 felony counts that California Attorney General Xavier Becerra had brought against David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, the anti-abortion activists who had made widely circulated undercover videos of Planned Parenthood officials haggling and joking over the compensation they expected to receive for supplying the organs of fetuses aborted at Planned Parenthood clinics to for-profit “tissue-procurement” companies.
I wrote about the case for THE WEEKLY STANDARD shortly after Becerra lodged the felony charges on March 28, and it seemed to me more persecution than prosecution. California law forbids the recording of conversations without the consent of all parties involved, so Becerra, a former Democratic congressman from Los Angeles, assigned a separate criminal count to each of 14 secretly recorded conversations that Deleiden and Merritt, posing as tissue-procurers themselves, had had with high-level Planned Parenthood employees at restaurants, abortion conventions, and other venues during 2013 and 2014, and also with the CEO of StemExpress, a Placerville, California, tissue supply firm, that had partnered at the time with some of Planned Parenthood’s Northern California clinics to retrieve fetal body parts onsite. For the statute in question, California Penal Code Section 632, prosecutorial discretion allows charges to be brought as either felonies or misdemeanors. Becerra went the felony route. His aim seemed to be to put Daleiden and Merritt behind bars for as long as legally possible; each separate felony conviction for violating Section 632 could entail a year in state prison plus a hefty fine.
There were always legal issues that could have stood in the way of automatic Section 632 convictions for the pair: How much expectation of privacy—an essential element of a violation of the anti-recording law—did the alleged victims really have in the public places where the conversations occurred, for example. But what really killed the greater part of Becerra’s case, at least for now, was his office’s insistence on keeping secret such key information as the names of the alleged Planned Parenthood victims.
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Photo by Elvert Barnes, Flickr, Creative Commons License
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