URGENT: Sign the petition demanding that the charges against David Daleiden be dropped. Click here.
HOUSTON, May 25, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – The district attorney who indicted two undercover pro-life investigators is now admitting she violated the law in the process – but says her own brand of lawbreaking was “minor and harmless.”
Devon Anderson's most recent court brief is nothing short of amazing.
Anderson is the district attorney of Harris County, Texas, where a grand jury charged David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt with two crimes that could put them behind bars for 20 years.
Last month, Daleiden's attorneys asked a judge to dismiss the charges, because the DA's office colluded with Planned Parenthood's attorneys behind the scenes and broke a Texas law requiring that indictments be kept secret until the suspect is taken into custody.
Anderson confirms that her office turned over Daleiden's full video footage to Planned Parenthood but denies that her prosecutors' friendly, open relationship with an organization they're supposed to be criminally investigating should raise any alarms.
But on another front, Anderson admits her office broke the law – and that its disregard for the legal process was an “oversight” that was “inconsequential.”
The law in question, which Anderson quotes in her brief, states:
If the defendant is not in custody or under bond at the time of the presentment of indictment, the indictment may not be made public and the entry in the record of the court relating to the indictment must be delayed until the capias is served and the defendant is placed in custody or under bond.
Anderson issued a press release the day of the indictments, and posted an online video that week, long before Merritt or Daleiden turned themselves in.
“That oversight was a mere technical, inconsequential violation of” the law, Anderson says in her new brief – a tiny “procedural irregularity” that “was minor and harmless,” her brief says.
To bolster her case, Anderson cites a court ruling that involved a “typographical error.”
I'm heartened to see her present her entire press release as one enormous typo.
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But not even the most media-hungry pol can argue with a straight face that she wrote a press statement and oversaw its mass media distribution by accident.
Looking at Anderson's press conference in context proves her actions were anything but “harmless.”
By January, Planned Parenthood had suffered a six-month deluge of negative publicity, as a series of videos exposed their leadership apparently admitting with blithe indifference that they illegally alter the abortion procedure and perform partial birth abortions to extract human organs for profit. StemExpress reportedly cut ties with its affiliates. States launched criminal investigations and began defunding its offices in the meantime.
The abortion lobby desperately wanted three things:
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They wanted the videos to stop;
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They wanted the full video footage, so they could get ahead of it from a PR angle; and
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They wanted pro-life investigators broke, homeless, and if possible imprisoned.
Anderson called a grand jury to investigate the abortion industry. But Planned Parenthood's lawyer, Josh Schaeffer, has admitted he worked with a prosecutor in Anderson's office to do an “end run” around the charges and refocus the grand jury on the investigators. He worked with them to obtain the video footage on behalf of his client.
Still, Planned Parenthood wanted more. They had pushed for the criminal prosecution of the Center for Medical Progress for months. Schaeffer says in an affidavit that he repeatedly told the Harris County DA's office of his “belief” that the investigators had broken the law.
Then the grand jury – which Schaeffer says “did not even vote on whether to indict” Planned Parenthood – handed down the first criminal charges in the nation against CMP.
URGENT: Sign the petition demanding that the charges against David Daleiden be dropped. Click here.
And Anderson sought a national stage to put her face as a purportedly “pro-life” litigator on the indictment.
The abortion industry and its political sycophants used the decision to assert that, not only had Planned Parenthood been found “innocent” of any wrongdoing, but the underlying CMP investigation had been discredited. It was a total propaganda coup achieving all of Planned Parenthood's objectives.
A prosecutor defending her own violation of the law is troubling in itself.
But it's interesting to see Anderson argue that people should overlook the violation of some laws, because other underlying criminal actions it stops are more serious. That's exactly what David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt were arguing. Their use of a fake ID – and the laughable allegation that they really wanted to purchase human organs – pales in comparison to the macabre and likely felonious enterprise they revealed.
The fact that a “pro-life” district attorney defends her own criminal actions in order to prosecute the pro-life movement, at the direction of Planned Parenthood, should expose this politically motivated persecution for the kangaroo court that it is.
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