In a major surprise decision, a San Francisco judge ordered all but one of the charges dropped against the filmmakers of the inside sting videos of Planned Parenthood in the last couple years.
The filmmakers, David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, were facing fifteen felony charges leveled against them by the California Attorney General.
Then in the course of the proceedings it was discovered that the CA AG was a major recipient of Planned Parenthood money and therefore was only pursuing charges on behalf of his special interest client.
That’s when the judge declared 14 of those charges ‘legally insufficient’, which is a fancy way of saying they were a bunch of bovine excrement.
Now if Congress would get off the fence and defund Planned Parenthood outright, that’d be just peachy, thanks.
Here’s more from Redstate…
As most of you know, in the wake of the sting videos documenting Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers flogging the organs and other body parts of babies they had murdered on a gray-market to medical “research” companies, the producers of the video, David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, were hit by two major felony indictments bought and paid for by the abortion industry. They were indicted in Houston, TX, and in San Francisco, CA. In both cases, members of the prosecution teams who sought the indictments were actively involved in the abortion industry and had accepted money from the abortion industry. Last June, the Texas charges were dropped as the Planned Parenthood asset who led the charge was turned out of office.
This left Daleiden and Merritt facing fifteen felony charges in a state where the attorney general was a major recipient of Planned Parenthood dollars. If you read the indictment, you will find that they were charged with video-recording non-private conversations in a non-private space. In short, California’s AG, Xavier Becerra sought to criminalize journalism if it hurt his puppetmasters.
Once Becerra issued a press release, the fight entered the realm of law. Yesterday, a judge in San Francisco acted in a most surprising way. He actually acted as though the US Constitution and the rule of law existed:
The San Francisco Superior Court on Wednesday dismissed 14 of 15 criminal counts but the pair are still charged with one count of conspiracy to invade privacy. However the court dismissed the charges with leave to amend — meaning Becerra could re-file the charges with additional supposed evidence against the pair.
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.
Daleiden and Merritt aren’t home free yet. Becerra could, and probably will, refile the indictment but, unless he comes up with a lot more than charging them with video-recording a conversation in a crowded restaurant and claiming they conversation was private, the outcome will probably be the same. What Becerra is doing is using the power of his office to harass Daleiden and Merritt, to paralyze their ability to act, and to inflict massive legal costs upon them in order to prevent other pro-life people from embarrassing abortionists in the future.
