Anti-abortion activist David Daleiden speaks at a news conference outside a court in Houston, Texas, February 4, 2016.
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The Houston district attorney’s office on Tuesday dropped the last criminal charge, for felony false identification, against anti-abortion activist David Daleiden, whose secret recordings of Planned Parenthood officials inflamed national politics last summer.
And now an attorney says the prosecutors and their indictments of David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt should be investigated. The potential sentencing was of up to 20 years each in prison and a $10 000 fine but prosecutors had dropped the case just before the hearing that was scheduled to address the legitimacy of the government’s case.
Prosecutors initially charged Daleiden and Merritt based on their use of fraudulent licenses to gain access to Planned Parenthood facilities to surreptitiously record patients and employees.
“It doesn’t mean a current grand jury couldn’t consider it”.
But Daleiden’s sting backfired when a grand jury, which the Harris County district attorney’s office convened to look into the activities of Planned Parenthood, indicted Daleiden and Merritt instead.
Anderson, a Republican who ran as a “proud, pro-life Texan mother of two” during the 2014 election, supported the charges when they were handed down in January, stressing at the time that at the outset of the investigation, she stated that “we must go where the evidence leads us”. The duo worked undercover to produce a series of videos alleging Planned Parenthood’s involvement in the sale of unborn baby body parts.
Last month, a group of 18 prominent journalists and first amendment scholars filed a brief saying Daleiden’s claims that he is a journalist are “wrong and damaging to the vital role that journalism serves in our society”. Instead, they forced Daleiden and Merritt to deal with a clearly political indictment meant to embarrass and silence them, rather than speak out about what their investigation discovered.
David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt were behind last year’s videos that purported to show Planned Parenthood selling aborted fetal tissue for a profit, a practice that would be illegal.
Planned Parenthood has said Daleiden and Merritt presented fake IDs in April 2015 and posed as research executives from a fictitious company to secretly film conversations at a health and administrative center in Houston.
Daleiden, 27, was charged with a misdemeanor for attempting to buy human organs.
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In a statement after the final charges were dropped, Daleidon’s Center for Medical Progress said, “Planned Parenthood tried to collude with public officials to manipulate the legal process to their own benefit, and they failed”. In one video, Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services, discusses the matter with the two operatives.
