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SAN FRANCISCO, California, September 5, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — A former senior director of medical services of Planned Parenthood Federation of America was caught in a contradiction while testifying at the criminal preliminary hearing of David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt Wednesday.
The pro-life investigators from the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) are charged with 14 felony counts under Penal Code section 632 of “intentionally and without the consent of all parties” recording “confidential” communications, and another count of conspiracy to violate section 632, in connection with undercover videos they released in 2015.
Watch this special report where LifeSite Managing Editor Patrick Craine speaks with reporter Lianne Laurence who is on the ground in San Francisco covering the criminal case against pro-life investigators David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt.
The result of CMP’s three-year investigation, the videos exposed Planned Parenthood’s involvement in selling baby body parts and spurred a Congressional investigation and calls for the abortion giant to be stripped of its federal tax dollars.
These videos included one of “Doe 9” discussing her participation in the fetal tissue market during a lunch with Daleiden and Merritt.
Doe 9 said Planned Parenthood abortionists use ultrasound guidance to dismember babies in utero to leave marketable body parts intact, and infamously elaborated: “I’m not gonna crush that part. I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”
She also seemed to describe herself and others performing the illegal partial-birth abortion method.
“Some people will actually try to change the presentation so that it’s not vertex [head first],” she says in the video. “So, if you do it starting from the breech presentation [feet first]…often, the last step, you can evacuate an intact calvarium [the head] at the end.”
Doe 9’s identity cannot be revealed because presiding judge Christopher Hite of the San Francisco Superior Court ruled the names will be sealed during the prosecution.
CMP’s legal team of Peter Breen from the Thomas More Society, Horatio Mihet of Liberty Counsel, Brentford Ferreira, and Nic Cocis are arguing the law states conversations are not confidential when there is a reasonable expectation they will be overheard.
They also are arguing that undercover taping is allowed when those doing so have a reasonable belief they are collecting evidence relating to a violent crime.
Doe 9 told the court she was “shocked” by the video because her two-hour lunch with Daleiden and Merritt, who were posing as buyers from a fetal tissue procurement company, was “edited to make it seem I was saying things I was not.”
Deputy Attorney General Johnette Jauron began asking Doe 9 about repercussions she suffered from the video’s publication, but defense lawyer Mihet repeatedly objected this was irrelevant.
When Hite agreed Jauron had to show probable cause for her line of questioning, she dropped it.
This reveals the prosecution’s case is “not just without merit, but downright frivolous,” Mihet told LifeSiteNews later.
“What the attorney general was trying to do was to introduce supposed evidence of threats and harassments that some of these supposed victims received after the videos came out,” he said.
Those claims have “no place whatsoever in these proceedings,” which are “about whether or not the conversations that took place in public places were legally or illegally recorded by the defendants,” Mihet said.
He asked Doe 9 if she cared whether the videos surreptitiously recorded by Daleiden and Merritt were released publicly.
“Of course I care,” she said.
Mihet then pointed out Doe 9 said otherwise in her deposition under oath in the Planned Parenthood civil suit against Daleiden and Merritt and other pro-life organizations.
“I haven’t done anything wrong in any of the videos,” Doe 9 said then. “It doesn’t matter to me if any of them are released publicly.”
“When the supposed victim herself says, nah, I don’t care if these videos are published to the public, well, that shows without any doubt there wasn’t anything in these videos that should have been kept from the public,” Mihet told LifeSiteNews.
Moreover, Doe 9 was not even aware she was in other CMP recordings until told so by prosecution lawyers, he noted.
“This is the DA, the attorney general coming forward to bring a prosecution on behalf of victims who don’t know they’re victims and who don’t care if these videos are ever published,” said Mihet.
“This whole thing is a farce…And this is only the preliminary hearing.”
Moreover, Doe 9 admitted under questioning that her conversation at the lunch could be overheard, he said.
“The law is crystal clear” that communications that “can reasonably expected to be overheard” by parties not involved in the conversation “cannot be confidential, and therefore cannot be illegally recorded,” Mihet told LifeSiteNews.
The CMP legal team asked in April that the case be dropped to no avail, and Mihet expects a jury trial will follow this preliminary hearing, which is scheduled to continue until September 13.
“We’re looking at this as just a chance to show the court, to show the public, to show anyone who cares and who’s listening the injustice that’s being perpetrated against Sandra Merritt and David Daleiden for merely bringing out the truth, for merely exercising their First Amendment rights,” he said.
Doe 9’s testimony continues Thursday.