A judge who has supported Planned Parenthood has rejected one of our key expert witnesses—someone with detailed knowledge of the abortion giant’s extreme cruelty to tiny infants.
Planned Parenthood is suing Sandra Merritt for millions. It wants to crush and bankrupt the 66-year-old grandmother for using a hidden camera to expose its hideous trade in human body parts—brains, hearts, lungs, livers—harvested from the helpless babies it kills.
We’re bringing our case in her defense this week—but the judge is tying our hands.
Liberty Counsel brings its case in defense of pro-life hero Sandra Merritt this week—but we’re handicapped.
That’s because U.S. District Court Judge William Orrick—a man with long-term ties to Planned Parenthood—is excluding key experts from our witness list.
One is Dr. Teresa Deisher, a stem cell scientist who earned her Ph.D. at Stanford. Dr. Deisher testified in Sandra Merritt’s criminal hearing in August that she was horrified when she learned human hearts harvested from living babies were being used for research.
She made that shocking discovery after reading studies that used baby human hearts sourced from Planned Parenthood abortion mills. Dr. Deisher said the nature of those studies indicated that the hearts had to be still beating when cut out, without anesthesia, from the aborted babies.
That’s breathtaking, cruel, and criminal.
Dr. Deisher testified in the criminal hearing that, as a researcher, she had to go to great lengths in her mice studies to ensure the mice do not suffer needless pain. Had she cut the beating hearts out of living mice, she told the court, she would go to jail and face ethical charges.
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But Judge Orrick won’t let Dr. Deisher testify in the civil case! That’s especially troubling given Orrick’s personal history with Planned Parenthood.
Before his appointment to the bench, Judge Orrick was board secretary and legal counsel for a San Francisco-area family resource center which shares space and helps run a Planned Parenthood facility that refers for abortions.
Judge Orrick has already censored other key testimony from the trial.
He refused to let Liberty Counsel lead attorney Harry Mihet ask Sandra on the witness stand about organ procurement technician Holly O’Donnell’s sensational eye-witness testimony.
Here’s what Judge Orrick didn’t want jurors to hear . . .
Holly O’Donnell, now deceased, formerly worked for StemExpress, a for-profit organ procurement firm. She told Sandra’s colleague, David Daleiden, on video that she witnessed a nearly intact late-term aborted baby lying on a table at a Planned Parenthood facility.
She watched in horror when a coworker took an instrument and, O’Donnell recalled, “she just taps the heart and it starts beating.”
“I don’t know if that constitutes it’s technically dead, or it’s alive,” O’Donnell added.
Then the coworker told O’Donnell to harvest the infant’s brain. She showed O’Donnell how to slice the child’s face with a scissors, starting at the chin, so she could extract the brain tissue.
“I can’t even describe what that feels like,” O’Donnell said.
The judge also stopped Sandra when she started to discuss learning that beating hearts are cut from living babies for researchers—which she called “horrific.”
The law and the facts are on Sandra’s side in this case—but we’re up against abortion giant Planned Parenthood in San Francisco with a judge who has rejected key witness testimony.
LifeNews Note: Mat Staver is the Chairman of Liberty Counsel Action and Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel.
