A pro-life investigative journalist is at the center of an ongoing case with abortion-provider Planned Parenthood.
Beginning in 2013, David Daleiden set out to expose Planned Parenthood’s sale of aborted fetal body parts. He posed as a potential buyer and secretly recorded the organization’s employees admitting to this illicit market.
In a new court filing, Daleiden’s legal team argues that the state is suppressing exculpatory evidence from former Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas. The DA’s declaration confirmed that Daleiden’s investigation unearthed crimes including infanticide, partial-birth abortion, battery, and the sale of fetal body parts.
Buying or selling human body parts is a federal crime, and trafficking aborted children is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $500,000.
Rackaukas’ declaration also stated that Daldien’s undercover recordings are legal since they exposed crimes that would have gone unnoticed otherwise.
“The state of California is criminalizing investigative journalism, and attempting to suppress evidence that would exculpate Mr. Daleiden from these groundless charges,” attorneys Steve Cooley and Siannah Collado said in a statement Friday evening.
However, the attorney general is denying these findings and painting Daldien as an “agent provocateur who sought only to damage Planned Parenthood.”
Furthermore, prosecutors are demanding Daldien’s legal team refrain from using terms that have the power to evoke an “emotional response” regardless of their accuracy.
“The AG essentially seeks a gag order at trial concerning testimony and public statements that would prevent both defendants and their counsel from characterizing the evidence as they see fit,” Daleiden’s counsel wrote.
As The Federalist so accurately described,
The state wants to prevent Rackauckas from testifying because his statements affirm what California state law already establishes, and is the crux of Daleiden’s defense: Journalists recording undercover videos are protected by law if they are making reasonable, good faith efforts to investigate violent crimes.
Antoinette Aho writes for American Liberty News primarily on pro-life news. Previously, she was the Politics Editor at Fact Based America and an intern for Campus Reform at the Leadership Institute. Antoinette is a young Catholic living in Sacramento, California.
The State of Kalifornia is complicit in this baby-butchery. The evidence is overwhelming. The abortion and baby parts industry is caught and now they are waging legal war to hide their criminality.
No one could possible be surprised at anything the loony left wing socialist “nation” of kalifornia says or does. They have been marching to a different drummer for a lot of years now and they seem to make up their own laws and rules to justify anything they do. Instead of walling off Mexico we need to wall off California.