Most pro-life Advocates are familiar with David Daleiden, the man behind the undercover videos exposing Planned Parenthood and its sale of aborted baby body parts. But they may be less familiar with Sandra Merritt. Merritt was one of a handful of people who assisted Daleiden in putting together the undercover operation that resulted in shocking confessions from top Planned Parenthood officials.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra filed 15 felony charges against both David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt in an attempt to discredit the videos. Becerra is a longtime abortion advocate with financial connections to the Planned Parenthood abortion company that the two pro-life Advocates exposed in the videos for selling body parts such as fetal brains and livers. The court has already dismissed the charges one time but allowed the Attorney General to refile the charges with additional supposed evidence and now attorneys for the two are asking the court to dismiss the charges again.
The court ruled that counts 1-14 were legally insufficient. The state has the opportunity to amend if it can plead a more legally sufficient and specific complaint. The California’s Attorney General filed 15 criminal counts against Merritt, with counts 1-14 for each of the alleged interviews and count 15 for an alleged conspiracy. San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Christopher Hite gave the state attorney general’s office until mid-July to file a revised complaint.
Yesterday, Merritt filed a reply in support of her Motion to Dismiss counts 1-14, in which she asked the San Francisco Superior Court to dismiss the politically-motivated criminal charges brought against her by the State of California.
Liberty Counsel is defending Merritt and seeks dismissal of the 14 felony charges brought against her for her undercover work in exposing Planned Parenthood’s unethical and potentially illegal profiteering from the sale of aborted baby body parts. The Court had previously agreed with Liberty Counsel that the criminal complaint filed by Attorney General Xavier Becerra against Merritt was legally defective and dismissed 14 of the 15 counts. The Court and California law granted the Attorney General 10 days to attempt to correct the defects and re-file the charges, but the Attorney General failed to file any amended complaint in Merritt’s case within the required deadline.
The Attorney General now claims that his failure to timely file an Amended Complaint was a mere “clerical error,” that should be “corrected” by the Court. However, Liberty Counsel’s reply demonstrates that California law is clear and unforgiving, mandating that the belated charges be dismissed. If California’s top attorney, with the full resources of the state, could not manage to bring his political charges within the required deadline, no court has the power to fix that “error.” Dismissal is the only remedy.
Horatio Mihet, Liberty Counsel’s Vice President of Legal Affairs and Chief Litigation Counsel, said, “The Attorney General – California’s top lawyer with a staff of 4,500 and an annual budget in excess of $800 million – has no excuse for his inability to comply with clear and simple legal requirements in the high-profile political prosecution he has chosen to bring against Sandra Merritt. This bogus case must be dismissed.”
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Liberty Counsel argued that the criminal complaint for illegally recording supposedly “private” conversations (in restaurants, hotel lobbies and other public places) – the first ever filed against undercover journalists – was legally deficient for numerous reasons, not the least of which was the Attorney General’s decision to prosecute Merritt in secret proceedings, without identifying even the names of her accusers or purported “victims.” The complaint did not provide Merritt with the minimum notice required by the Constitution and California law as to what she supposedly did wrong, so that she can mount a proper and vigorous defense. The complaint was also vague and full of inconsistencies.
These charges where the second set of charges filed against Daleiden and Merritt as the first were filed by pro-abortion prosecutors in Houston. Those charges were also eventually dropped and we’re condemned as bogus political charges.
The expose’ videos catching Planned Parenthood officials selling the body parts of aborted babies have shocked the nation. Here is a list of all 14:
- In the first video: Dr. Deborah Nucatola of Planned Parenthood commented on baby-crushing: “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”
- In the second video: Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Mary Gatter joked, “I want a Lamborghini” as she negotiated the best price for baby parts.
- In the third video: Holly O’Donnell, a former Stem Express employee who worked inside a Planned Parenthood clinic, detailed first-hand the unspeakable atrocities and how she fainted in horror over handling baby legs.
- In the fourth video: Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Savita Ginde stated, “We don’t want to do just a flat-fee (per baby) of like, $200. A per-item thing works a little better, just because we can see how much we can get out of it.” She also laughed while looking at a plate of fetal kidneys that were “good to go.”
- In the fifth video: Melissa Farrell of Planned Parenthood-Gulf Coast in Houston boasted of Planned Parenthood’s skill in obtaining “intact fetal cadavers” and how her “research” department “contributes so much to the bottom line of our organization here, you know we’re one of the largest affiliates, our Research Department is the largest in the United States.”
- In the sixth video: Holly O’Donnell described technicians taking fetal parts without patient consent: “There were times when they would just take what they wanted. And these mothers don’t know. And there’s no way they would know.”
- In the seventh and perhaps most disturbing video: Holly O’Donnell described the harvesting, or “procurement,” of organs from a nearly intact late-term fetus aborted at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte’s Alameda clinic in San Jose, CA. “‘You want to see something kind of cool,’” O’Donnell says her supervisor asked her. “And she just taps the heart, and it starts beating. And I’m sitting here and I’m looking at this fetus, and its heart is beating, and I don’t know what to think.”
- In the eighth video: StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer admits Planned Parenthood sells “a lot of” fully intact aborted babies.
- The ninth video: catches a Planned Parenthood medical director discussing how the abortion company sells fully intact aborted babies — including one who “just fell out” of the womb.
- The 10th video: catches the nation’s biggest abortion business selling specific body parts — including the heart, eyes and “gonads” of unborn babies. The video also shows the shocking ways in which Planned Parenthood officials admit that they are breaking federal law by selling aborted baby body parts for profit.
- Unreleased Videos: Unreleased videos from CMP show Deb Vanderhei of Planned Parenthood caught on tape talking about how Planned Parenthood abortion business affiliates may “want to increase revenue [from selling baby parts] but we can’t stop them…” Another video has a woman talking about the “financial incentives” of selling aborted baby body parts.
- The 11th video: catches a Texas Planned Parenthood abortionist planning to sell the intact heads of aborted babies for research. Amna Dermish is caught on tape describing an illegal partial-birth abortion procedure to terminate living, late-term unborn babies which she hopes will yield intact fetal heads for brain harvesting.
- The 12th video in the series shows new footage of Jennefer Russo, medical director at Planned Parenthood in Orange County, California, describing to undercover investigators how her abortion business tries to harvest intact aborted babies’ bodies for a local for-profit biotech company and changes the abortion procedure to do so.
- The 13th video: exposes a Planned Parenthood medical director admitting that babies born alive after abortion are sometimes killed.
- The 14th video: catches Planned Parenthood executives discussing gruesome abortion procedures and the sale of body parts from aborted babies for profit.
