COURTS Judge chides antiabortion activist, lawyers
A federal judge said Tuesday he would hold antiabortion activist David Daleiden and his lawyers in contempt of court for posting clandestine videos of conversations with abortion providers despite the judge’s order to keep them sealed.
U.S. District Judge William Orrick III of San Francisco said Daleiden’s lawyers Steve Cooley and Brent Ferreira had knowingly violated his orders and that Daleiden and his nonprofit organization, the Center for Medical Progress, were also responsible. Cooley is a former Los Angeles County district attorney who narrowly lost the state attorney general’s election to Kamala Harris in 2008.
Daleiden and others from his organization posed as fetal researchers to enter the conventions of the National Abortion Federation in San Francisco in 2014 and Baltimore in 2015 and later posted edited versions of conversations they recorded using hidden recorders. Orrick issued an injunction in February 2016 forbidding further public display of the recordings.
But in May, after state Attorney General Xavier Becerra filed criminal charges in March accusing Daleiden and a colleague of illegally recording speakers without their consent, his lawyers in the criminal case posted YouTube links to the videos. They said they had obtained them from Becerra’s office as evidence and did not consider themselves bound by a federal judge’s injunction in a separate case.
Matthew Geragos, an attorney for Cooley and Ferreira, said Tuesday that the lawyers were not defying Orrick’s order but merely trying to defend their client and his right to a public trial. But the judge said the lawyers and their client were not entitled to decide whether to obey court orders.
Orrick has not yet issued a formal contempt order, but he could require Daleiden and his lawyers to pay damages to the National Abortion Federation and could also refer the attorneys to the State Bar of California for discipline.
The postings “placed NAF and its members in danger,” said Derek Foran, a lawyer for the National Abortion Federation.
In a statement after the hearing, the Center for Medical Progress said it would appeal Orrick’s “unconstitutional gag order.”