Kansas Abortion Practitioner Tiller Seeks Planned Parenthood Docs to Help Himself
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
December 16, 2008
Overland Park, KS (LifeNews.com) — It appears late-term abortion practitioner George Tiller could be seeking documents in a case against Planned Parenthood to help his own legal battles.
A Kansas court will hold a hearing on Thursday related to a subpoena Planned Parenthood attorneys have filed. The abortion business is under investigation for allegedly doing illegal abortions and falsifying medical records and it is taking another shot at Phill Kline, the county attorney behind the probe.
Planned Parenthood is hoping to prevent the Johnson County District Attorney from keeping its abortion records after his term expires next month.
Kline filed 107 charges against the abortion business for allegedly violating state law.
Lawyer Pedro Irigonegaray issued a subpoena last week and he says he wants to prevent Kline from keeping the records after he leaves the district attorney’s office on January 12.
Now, the pro-life group Operation Rescue says court records it has examined show attorneys for late-term abortion practitioner George Tiller, based in Wichita, has asked for copies of documents related to the prosecution of Planned Parenthood.
In what it describes as an interesting twist in the case, Tiller’s attorneys filed a motion on Friday asking for a Sedgwick County judge to grant them all documents related to the Kline subpoena.
In addition, Tiller’s defense is asking for copies of documents from Kline’s Planned Parenthood abortion investigations that Kline provided to the Attorney General’s office last week after a request by the Kansas Supreme Court.
OR president Troy Newman tells LifeNews.com he thinks Tiller’s and Planned Parenthood’s attorneys are working together to conceal their illegal activities — since Tiller has been subject to similar criminal charges from the state attorney general.
"Planned Parenthood and Tiller are obviously working in tandem on a desperate fishing expedition for anything they can use to weasel themselves out of the criminal charges they both face," he said.
"Every judge that has reviewed the records has ruled that there is probable cause to believe that both Tiller and Planned Parenthood have violated the law," Newman added. "But they will stop at nothing to strip prosecutors of that incriminating evidence, and conceal their crimes from the public."
"The legal wrangling in these two abortion criminal cases is unlike anything we have ever seen before," Newman added. "It’s almost like the prosecutor is the one on trial, not the law-breaking abortionists. We will continue to monitor these cases and pray that justice will prevail."
As Attorney General, Kline investigated both Tiller and Planned Parenthood. When Kline became the District Attorney of Johnson County, he continued his investigation of Planned Parenthood, charging it with 107 criminal charges.
Tiller’s current criminal case was filed by the Attorney General’s office after Kline became the county prosecutor.
That case is currently in hiatus and scheduled to resume an interrupted hearing on a motion to suppress evidence next month. Kline is expected to complete testimony that he began in November.
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