The undercover investigators who exposed Planned Parenthood’s baby body parts trade are still fighting in court to avoid being punished for their shocking exposé.
This week, Thomas More Society lawyer Peter Breen told One News Now that they are working on challenging the civil and criminal cases against David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress.
Daleiden faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of the 10 criminal charges that California Attorney General Xavier Becerra is pursuing. In the civil case, Daleiden also could be forced to pay $2.2 million, awarded by a jury in 2019, unless his appeal succeeds.
Breen said they just filed an appeal challenging a superior court judge’s decision allowing the 10 criminal charges against Daleiden to proceed, according to the report.
If the appeal fails, “we then go to a jury trial in front of a San Francisco jury on any of these remaining felony counts,” Breen said. “We started with 15 [charges]; we’re down to ten, and with a potential penalty of a decade in San Quentin penitentiary if we’re unsuccessful.”
Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris and current Attorney General Becerra, both Democrats who received campaign donations from Planned Parenthood, are prosecuting Daleiden for exposing the baby body parts trade at Planned Parenthood.
California law requires that both parties consent to be recorded, and Becerra alleges that Daleiden broke the law by filming their conversations with abortionists and others without their consent.
In February, Daleiden pleaded not guilty in California Superior Court to felony charges involving eavesdropping, falsifying documents and recording people without their consent.
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Here’s more from the report:
Meanwhile, in the civil cases for David Daleiden, attorneys are now looking at post-trial motions to challenge (a) the $2.3 million verdict against Daleiden and (b) a permanent injunction that was entered by the district court judge to forbid Daleiden from ever doing undercover work against Planned Parenthood again.
“The legal theories that Planned Parenthood employed in the case against David Daleiden could be used by any entity or politician or person against an undercover journalist who was exposing wrongdoing, whether it be corrupt politicians, whether it is those who are abusing animals — anything,” Breen warns. “They can use these same legal theories against undercover journalists.”
Earlier this month, California Judge William Orrick, who has connections to Planned Parenthood, ruled in favor of the jury verdict and issued an injunction prohibiting Daleiden and other defendants from entering Planned Parenthoods and pro-abortion conferences to record videos without the consent of those being recorded.
Daleiden’s lawyers have warned repeatedly that the case could have a chilling effect on all future undercover journalism.
Even legal scholars and news outlets that support abortion have slammed Harris and Becerra for prosecuting Daleiden and fellow undercover investigator Sandra Merritt.
“Whatever the precise facts of this case prove to be, the prosecution has broader implications, and not just for abortion and anti-abortion speech,” law professors Sherry F. Colb and Michael C. Dorf wrote in a column for CNN. “Undercover exposés play a vital role in informing the American public of important facts that would otherwise remain hidden.”
The Los Angeles Times editorial board also slammed the California Attorney General’s office for threatening citizen journalists and jeopardizing the freedom of the press.
“It’s disturbingly aggressive for Becerra to apply this criminal statute to people who were trying to influence a contested issue of public policy, regardless of how sound or popular that policy may be,” the editors wrote in 2017. “… The state doesn’t need to threaten the pair with prison time.”
Lawyers with Liberty Council, a pro-life legal firm representing Merritt, said, to date, no other citizen journalist or journalism group has ever been charged with a crime for undercover recordings made in the public interest.
In November, Daleiden, Merritt and the Center for Medical Progress lost a civil case to the Planned Parenthood abortion chain. In that case, Planned Parenthood accused them of more than a dozen crimes, including trespassing, breach of confidentiality, wiretapping and conspiracy.
Their undercover videos did a lot of damage to Planned Parenthood when they revealed the abortion giant’s baby body parts operation. Not only did the Center for Medical Progress investigation raise concerns about potentially illegal sales of human body parts, but it also uncovered evidence of abortionists allegedly putting women’s lives at risk by altering abortion procedures to better harvest aborted baby parts. The investigators also found evidence of possible patient privacy violations.
These findings prompted investigations by the U.S. House and Senate, as well as a number of states. The House and Senate investigations both recommended that the Department of Justice investigate Planned Parenthood after finding strong evidence that the abortion chain broke the law. The Department of Justice is investigating.
Planned Parenthood repeatedly has denied all allegations of wrong-doing, and many news outlets now parrot its talking points that the undercover videos were deceptively edited or debunked, even though that is not true. An independent forensics investigation verified that the videos were authentic.
Some undercover videos show how Planned Parenthood employees callously and flippantly negotiated the price of tiny baby hearts, lungs, livers and brains. Other evidence indicates the abortion giant may have broken HIPAA patient privacy laws.
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.
