California has agreed to drop all charges against David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, following years of legal battles over the pro-life activists’ release of undercover videos showing abortion providers discussing the procurement and selling of aborted babies' body parts.
The Center for Medical Progress, the pro-life group overseen by Daleiden, announced Monday that he and Merritt had reached a plea agreement with the California Attorney General’s Office.
According to the agreement, the two activists will make a “no contest” plea in which they will receive “no jail time, no fines, no admission of wrongdoing, and no probation.”
“The new ‘no contest’ plea — which cannot be used adversely — will be entered into judgment as a misdemeanor in 6 to 12 months, and then converted to a ‘not guilty’ plea, dismissed, and expunged,” explained CMP.
Daleiden was quoted in the announcement as saying that the settlement was “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,” said Daleiden. “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.”
Mat Staver, founder and chairman of The Liberty Counsel, which helped to represent Merritt, released a statement on Monday also celebrating the negotiated agreement.
“Sandra Merritt did nothing wrong. She did the right thing by exposing the depravity of the abortion industry. This plea agreement ends an unjust criminal case by dropping these baseless criminal charges without any prison time, fines or other penalties,” stated Staver.
“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.”
In 2015, CMP released a series of undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood officials discussing the illegal sale of aborted babies' body parts. Planned Parenthood has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, claiming that the videos were deceptively edited even though the videos were also released in their entirety.
Daleiden and Merritt also secretly recorded conversations that took place at conferences hosted by the National Abortion Federation in 2014 and 2015, with NAF suing them in response.
In one of the undercover videos filmed at a Planned Parenthood workshop in Michigan in 2014, an abortion provider argued against helping young victims of rape and sexual assault. She asserted that because clinic workers are not state employees, they should not be required to report suspected cases of child abuse to authorities.
The videos garnered widespread condemnation and led to a renewed push to have the federal government defund Planned Parenthood and multiple investigations into whether the nation’s leading abortion provider was violating federal law.
They also led to years of litigation against Daleiden and Merritt, as they faced several charges including illegal recordings of private events and falsification of IDs as part of their cover.
In October 2022, for example, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit released a unanimous decision against the pro-life activists that required them to pay a $2.4 million judgment to Planned Parenthood.
Circuit Judge Ronald M. Gould authored the panel opinion, rejecting the arguments of the pro-life activists that their actions were protected by the First Amendment and journalistic practices.
“Invoking journalism and the First Amendment does not shield individuals from liability for violations of laws applicable to all members of society. None of the laws Appellants violated was aimed specifically at journalists or those holding a particular viewpoint,” wrote Gould in 2022.
“The two categories of compensatory damages permitted by the district court, infiltration damages and security damages, were awarded by the jury to reimburse Planned Parenthood for losses caused by Appellants’ violations of generally applicable laws.”
In May 2020, Daleiden filed a complaint against then U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and others, alleging that Harris wrongfully investigated him while she was attorney general of California.
“Daleiden became the first journalist ever to be criminally prosecuted under California’s recording law … because his investigation revealed and he published ‘shock[ing]’ content that California’s Attorney General and the private party coconspirators wanted to cover up,” stated the lawsuit.
“Defendants seek their ‘pound of flesh’ from Mr. Daleiden and to chill other journalists from investigating and reporting on that same content.”
Originally published by The Christian Post
