Sandra Merritt Prevails in Decade-Long Legal Battle Exposing Planned Parenthood’s Sale of Aborted Baby Parts

By Harry Mihet

Sandra Merritt’s decade-long criminal lawsuit is finally over — no fines and no 10-year prison sentence for this courageous pro-life grandmother. On Monday, we successfully pressed the State of California to end the criminal case against Sandra, an undercover journalist who dared to expose Planned Parenthood and its sickening organ-harvesting scheme.

I met Sandra 10 years ago in Houston on the night before she had to turn herself in on felony charges for secretly filming, and then revealing, Planned Parenthood’s grotesque profiteering from butchered baby body parts.

I instantly realized that this was no ordinary grandmother, but the most courageous grandmother in the United States.

We quickly obtained dismissal of the charges in Houston. But, instead of allowing her to enjoy her retirement and grandchildren, Kamala Harris, then the California attorney general, and the State of California wanted to have their turn at going after Sandra.

‘Justice’ Weaponized

Planned Parenthood filed a civil lawsuit against Sandra, and, at its behest, California charged Sandra with 16 felonies, all aimed at persecuting, bankrupting, and ultimately, putting Sandra in prison. While turning a blind eye to the abortion giant’s atrocities, California wanted to make an example out of Sandra, running roughshod over the rule of law for political purposes.

This began our eight-year legal battle in San Francisco to derail California’s political prosecution and keep Sandra out of jail. We were able to get eight of the felony charges dismissed a few years ago, but the remaining eight were set to be tried before a San Francisco jury.

Sandra’s crime? Along with her co-defendant, David Daleiden, the founder of The Center for Medical Progress, she produced a series of undercover videos that explicitly showed the abortion industry’s illegal and despicable sale of human body parts.

Then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris met with top Planned Parenthood officials in 2016 and ordered criminal investigations into Merritt and Daleiden while the next state attorney general, Xavier Becerra, eventually charged them with violating California’s recording law.

Instead of prosecuting the abortion giant for profiting from the criminal trafficking of aborted baby body parts, California weaponized its justice system to go after Merritt and Daleiden for allegedly violating a recording law in their surreptitious video recordings.

If Lady Justice is blind, why did the state turn its back on blatant criminal misconduct while punishing law-abiding journalists for exercising their constitutional freedom?

Before this case, the State of California had never criminally prosecuted journalists for undercover recordings made in the public interest. Yet, Sandra Merritt was charged and faced more than 10 years in prison for exposing the abortion industry’s profiteering from illegal fetal organ harvesting.

From pro-life activists being imprisoned for allegedly violating the FACE Act (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances) to pro-life journalists like Merritt and Daleiden being prosecuted, the sad reality is that a two-tiered justice system goes after those exposing abortion rather than the abortionists who are committing the atrocities.

After nearly a decade of defending Sandra against California, this legal fight that sought to imprison and bankrupt this pro-life grandmother has finally come to an end.

Justice for Sandra

On Monday, January 27, through God’s amazing grace and provision, we were finally able to end the prosecution for good when the court dismissed seven of the remaining eight felony charges.

On the last felony charge, Sandra pleaded “no contest,” and the State of California agreed for the charge to be reduced to a misdemeanor and then be forever removed from Sandra’s record.

This plea agreement ends an unjust criminal case by dropping these baseless criminal charges without any prison time, fines or other penalties. Sandra Merritt did the right thing by exposing the depravity of the abortion industry.

As a result, Sandra will have no prison time, no fines, and no punishment, whatsoever, while California walked away empty handed.

In the process of this decade-long and unprecedented legal fight, freedom of speech and press for investigative journalists was bolstered and Planned Parenthood’s crimes were exposed. Sandra’s courage paved the way for generations of journalists to expose wrongs and exercise First Amendment freedoms without fear of political prosecution.

And though Merritt and Daleiden are now free, the atrocities of Planned Parenthood they worked so hard to uncover are still being subsidized by the federal government. Liberty Counsel remains committed to protecting the unborn and dismantling every evil scheme against them.

Originally published in the Washington Stand.

For more from Harry Mihet, Vice President of Legal Affairs and Chief Litigation Counsel, click HERE.