Court rebuffs antiabortion activists

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday turned down a request by antiabortion activists to make public conversations they secretly recorded at national meetings of abortion providers in San Francisco and Baltimore after posing as researchers.

The justices, without comment, denied review of lowercourt rulings prohibiting the group called the Center for Medical Progress from publicly releasing the recordings or any other information its members obtained by infiltrating the annual meetings of the National Abortion Federation in San Francisco in 2014 and in Baltimore in 2015.

The group posted videos of some of the conversations on its website before U.S. District Judge William Orrick III of San Francisco issued an injunction barring further releases. One of the speakers recorded without his knowledge was affiliated with a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs that was attacked by an antiabortion gunman in November 2015, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in a ruling on the case. Three people were killed.

In separate proceedings, David Daleiden, leader of the Center for Medical Progress, and an employee, Sandra Merritt, have been charged by state Attorney General Xavier Becerra with felony violations of California criminal laws that prohibit the recording of private conversations without consent.

Daleiden and his colleagues gained access to the conventions by posing as representatives of a fetal-research company called BioMax Procurement Services, using false names and driver’s licenses.

Before entering the conventions, the BioMax representatives signed confidentiality agreements prohibiting the recording of any meetings or discussions, or the disclosure of any information obtained at the sessions.

In court, Daleiden and his group said they had been acting as investigative journalists and had uncovered criminal conduct. But Orrick, in his injunction ruling, found no evidence of lawbreaking by convention participants and said the BioMax entrants had violated their agreements.

The appeals court upheld his ruling in a 2-1 decision in March 2017 and said Daleiden’s group had obtained their information by fraud. The dissenting judge, Consuelo Callahan, said the court should allow the videos to be released to law enforcement agencies for investigation of possible crimes by participants at the convention.

After the Supreme Court refused to hear the case Monday, attorney Catherine Short of the Life Legal Foundation, who represented Daleiden and his organization, said they remained “confident that ultimately the tapes will be released and that our position on the law will be vindicated.”

Another defendant in the case, Troy Newman, a former Center for Medical Progress board member and currently president of the antiabortion group Operation Rescue, was represented by attorney Jay Sekulow, who is also a personal lawyer for President Trump.

The National Abortion Federation said it was “grateful that the Supreme Court denied the defendants’ latest attempt to circumvent very necessary security precautions that NAF has in place at its conferences.”

The case is Daleiden vs. National Abortion Federation, 17-202. Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko