Court ruling favors abortion foes
Judge in S.F. tosses invasion-of-privacy charges against activists who shot secret videos
A San Francisco judge dismissed 14 invasion-of-privacy charges Wednesday against two antiabortion activists who attended national meetings of abortion providers, posing as fetal researchers, and secretly recorded conversations with the participants.
Superior Court Judge Christopher Hite refused, however, to dismiss conspiracy charges against the pair, based on the same video recordings, and denied a defense request to make the videos public. State Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office, which filed the charges, said it can satisfy Hite’s objections and get the 14 charges reinstated.
David Daleiden, leader of the antiabortion Center for Medical Progress, and an employee of the group, Sandra Merritt, made the recordings at the conventions of the National Abortion Federation in San Francisco in 2014 and in Baltimore in 2015.
They said afterward that they had been acting as investigative journalists to expose alleged plots by Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers to sell fetal parts. Lawyers for the abortion federation say its members were subjected to
harassment and threats after Daleiden’s group posted edited versions of the recordings online.
Becerra’s office charged Daleiden and Merritt with violating a California law against recording conversations without consent. In a separate case, a federal judge in San Francisco issued an order last year prohibiting Daleiden and his group from making the recordings public, and has said he may hold Daleiden’s lawyers in contempt of court for posting links to many of the recordings last month.
In Hite’s court, lawyers for Daleiden and Merritt argued that their ability to put on a defense was unfairly hobbled because the charges stated only the date of each recording and did not name the person recorded or specify which of the hundreds of videos was the subject of the charge.
Prosecutors said they had provided the names to defense lawyers under a court order to keep them confidential. But Hite ruled that the charges were still too vague and must specify each of the 14 recordings that were allegedly made without consent.
He said no such specificity was required, however, for the charge of conspiring to violate abortion providers’ rights by surreptitiously recording them.
The ruling was nevertheless a “huge victory,” said Mat Staver, chairman of Liberty Counsel, a nonprofit religious conservative organization that represents Merritt. He predicted the conspiracy charge would also fail and said the prosecution was a threat to “every journalist who provides valuable information to the public.”
Becerra’s office, in a statement, said it has been given 10 days to specify the recordings on which each charge was based “and will be making the requested changes.”