California has agreed to dismiss the remaining charges against David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt of Center for Medical Progress for exposing Planned Parenthood’s criminal fetal organ harvesting business, ensuring that the pro-lifers will face no jail time, fines, or probation.
SAN FRANCISCO (LifeSiteNews) -- California prosecutors have finally agreed to dismiss the remaining counts against the investigators of Center for Medical Progress (CMP) for using undercover video to expose Planned Parenthood’s criminal fetal organ harvesting side business, putting an end to a nearly decade-long attempt to punish pro-life journalism.
Starting in 2015, CMP began releasing a series of secretly recorded conversations with officials from Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation that set off a firestorm of controversy and a string of revelations about the abortion industry breaking multiple federal laws against profiting off human tissue, altering abortion procedures for the sake of procuring more useful tissue samples, and potentially even committing partial-birth abortions or infanticide, as well as video examples of abortion workers displaying callousness toward the humanity of the children their "work" killed.
Neither the Obama nor first Trump administrations took action against the abortion organizations over the revelations, but the pro-lifers who exposed their activities were instead hit with various lawsuits and felony charges on claims of trespassing, misidentifying themselves with fake driver’s licenses, and recording people without their consent.
In December 2023, CMP lost its final appeal of a nearly $16 million civil judgment against them, which argued that the federal Racketeer Influenced & Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act had been misapplied. The U.S. Supreme Court had declined to intervene that October.
As for the criminal charges, half of California’s 14 charges for undercover video recording were dismissed for lack of probable cause, leaving seven pending. On Monday, CMP announced a negotiated settlement with the California Attorney General’s Office to dismiss the rest.
Per the terms of the agreement, CMP founder David Daleiden and reporter Sandra Merritt would plead “no contest” on one charge, which would be entered as a misdemeanor in 6-12 months before being converted to “not guilty,” dismissed, and expunged. Neither of them will suffer any jail time, fines, probation, or admission of wrongdoing. (Litigation continues in similar but separate charges in Oregon.)
“After enduring 9 years of weaponized political prosecution, putting an end to the lawfare launched by Kamala Harris is a huge victory for my investigative reporting and for the public’s right to know the truth about Planned Parenthood’s sale of aborted baby body parts. Now we all must get to work to protect families and infants from the criminal abortion-industrial complex,” Daleiden said. “Taking the San Francisco case off the board allows me to focus fully on CMP’s mission to report on the injustices of taxpayer-funded experiments on aborted babies and continue to expand our groundbreaking investigative reporting.”
“Sandra Merritt did nothing wrong. She did the right thing by exposing the depravity of the abortion industry,” added Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, which represented Merritt. “This plea agreement ends an unjust criminal case by dropping these baseless criminal charges without any prison time, fines or other penalties. Sandra deserves to be applauded and acclaimed for revealing these horrors and then enduring this selective and vindictive prosecution as a result. Murdering human babies to harvest their body parts for profit is evil and there is no excuse for Sandra’s political persecution. This is an extraordinary result for Sandra and the State of California deserves to walk away virtually empty handed.”
The new Trump Department of Justice most likely cannot prosecute Planned Parenthood for its pre-2015 breaking of federal laws against profiting from the sale of human organs or fetal tissue, as most federal crimes have a five-year statute of limitations. But in the years since the original videos, evidence has continued to emerge pointing to ongoing relationships between the abortion giant and tissue researchers, raising the possibility that a new federal investigation might uncover crimes recent enough to pursue.
