By BARBARA SIMPSON
Planned Parenthood has had it in legally for David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) ever since its undercover investigation of Planned Parenthood’s business which involves the harvesting and sale of aborted baby parts.
And PP has won again in court — the notoriously liberal Ninth Circuit in California.
The undercover investigation by CMP and Daleiden did great damage to Planned Parenthood when it revealed that the organization was deeply involved in procuring and selling human body parts from abortions as well as allegedly getting involved in the details of the abortion itself in order to better harvest the parts. Later investigation also found evidence of possible patient privacy violations. A reading of their findings is grim.
It should be noted that profiting from the sale of aborted fetal body parts is a federal crime.
In order to carry out its investigation, CMP created a fake company with fake identification for its employees and also recorded conversations with Planned Parenthood’s staff, as it gathered information for the investigation.
CMP spoke with Planned Parenthood’s staff and has audio and video evidence of those meetings which it has presented in court.
In 2019, a federal judge sided with Planned Parenthood, supporting their charges that CMP used illegal means to gather information for their investigation. The court awarded Planned Parenthood $2.4 million plus $13 million in fees. The jury and Judge William Orrick, who has ties to Planned Parenthood, awarded PP $16 million.
Questions were raised about Judge Orrick hearing the case. He had funded a Planned Parenthood Abortion Referral Clinic in the San Francisco area, raising questions of conflict of interest
Despite that, he refused to recuse himself from the case and the three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit denied there was any conflict of interest on Orrick’s part — so he was able to continue.
Daleiden and CMP are challenging the $13 million separately, but just last week they got the result of their appeal for the other part of the first court decree — the $2.4 million.
In their appeal of the first decision, CMP claimed that they were using means that are protected by the First Amendment. They pointed out that Planned Parenthood never declared that their findings against the organization were not true. In fact, their lawyers admitted in court that they were factual.
Despite that, the result from the hearing by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is that it upholds the position of Planned Parenthood against David Daleiden and CMP.
The court ruled that the First Amendment does not protect illegal activity and that journalism does not have the right to break the law. The court did overturn another part of the ruling that accused Daleiden and CMP of violating the Federal Wiretap Act.
Daleiden is being represented by The Thomas More Society. Peter Breen is vice president and senior counsel, and he says the ruling contradicts three decades of precedent protecting journalists’ free speech. He said it provides a roadmap for large corporations to shut down investigative journalists.
He said the next step for him and Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress is an appeal to the en banc full panel of judges of the Ninth Circuit. If that does not give them a satisfactory result, they plan to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
I have no doubt they mean what they say and quite honestly, from a legal point of view, I look forward to the entanglement that results. This case will set precedent and it is an issue that needs to be addressed, especially in light of the full court press by the Biden administration in favor of abortion.
This is historic.
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