The pre-trial hearing for the felony prosecution of Planned Parenthood of Mid-Missouri Kansas has been delayed for another 2 weeks because 23 Planned Parenthood-specific state abortion reports have been discovered as destroyed.
Judge Stephen Tatum granted the continuance due to the state’s plea that only recently had they learned that crucial evidence for proving a forgery –original copies of those state late-term abortion compliance reports from Planned Parenthood– had been destroyed in 2005 by the state of Kansas Health department (KDHE) under Gov. Kathleen Sebelius.
Despite requests, the KDHE has not yet issued a public comment on this bombshell that it had actually destroyed selective documents.
Back in 2005, Sebelius was losing her fight to keep various subpoenaed state information relevant to illegal post–viability abortions away from then-Attorney General Phill Kline. Kline had attained what’s called “probable cause” that crimes had been committed and was seeking patient files. But he had also seen copies of these state compliance reports which bore no patient names but were important because they had been filed with bogus language where legitimate medical reasons were supposed to have been supplied.
Political machinations swallowed those anticipated big-gun prosecutions. Kline lost his 2006 re-election campaign, but became the District attorney for Johnson County, the home of the Kansas Planned Parenthood abortion facility. He lodged 107 criminal charges against Planned Parenthood in October 2007, including 23 felony counts for allegedly forging copies of the 2003 state reports in August 2006.
The case was repeatedly stalled when KDHE steadfastly refused to bring the original reports to court in 2008 and never gave a hint that the 23 reports had already been destroyed 3years earlier!
Planned Parenthood has floated an excuse that the demise of evidence in their case was a “routine” document shredding. That is absurd!
First, there is no official listing of these reports as being subject to any purging–and they shouldn’t be. These reports could be used in both civil and criminal litigation. Current Johnson County DA Steve Howe revealed today that similar 2003 state reports from the George Tiller abortion business were still safely housed at KDHE in 2010! So this appears to be a tailored destruction meant to shield evidence that would hurt Planned Parenthood.
Second, these state abortion compliance reports –even though lacking any patient names– were the subject of an ongoing investigation into illegal post-viability abortions reaching up several times to the state supreme court. That doubles the reason they should have been guarded.
Third– there was never any need for these original reports for forgery comparison purposes until after August of 2006! That was when Planned Parenthood was notified that patient files lacked copies of these reports and allegedly triggered them to create the forgeries. Record-custodian Judge Richard Anderson suspected their late submissions were doctored, and was confirmed in this opinion by a police document expert.
Judge Anderson has been restricted from testifying about these alleged forgeries by the State Supreme Court and the Johnson County prosecutors now have to quickly determine if they can establish the legal chain of possession to secure Planned Parenthood criminal convictions.
LifeNews.com Note: Kathy Ostrowski is the legislative director for Kansans for Life, a statewide pro-life group.
