A California judge on Tuesday said David Daleiden “was engaged in criminal activity irrespective of his journalistic status.”
Daleiden, who coordinated his smear campaign against abortion care providers with Republican lawmakers and operatives, could face prison time if his case goes to jury trial.
Eric Kayne / Getty Images
A California judge on Tuesday ruled that anti-choice activist David Daleiden broke the law when he surreptitiously taped private conversations with abortion providers as part of a campaign to smear Planned Parenthood.
The ruling all but clears the way for a jury trial over the controversial recordings.
Daleiden, who coordinated the smear campaign against abortion care providers with Republican lawmakers and operatives, could face prison time if his case goes to a jury trial.
Tuesday’s ruling comes as a criminal preliminary hearing against Daleiden and co-defendant Sandra Merritt wraps up in San Francisco Superior Court, where abortion providers have testified anonymously against the pair. Raw footage of their discussions about fetal tissue donation has been played in court over the past two weeks.
Daleiden and Merritt insist they are “citizen journalists” who went undercover to investigate alleged fetal tissue trafficking by Planned Parenthood, therefore exempting them from liability under California’s eavesdropping law.
Daleiden had also sought to get overturned the 2016 search warrant for his Long Beach, California, apartment that would’ve led to the dismissal of the bulk of felony charges pending against him, claiming that as a “citizen journalist,” he was entitled to the protections of the California Shield Law. On Tuesday, Judge Christopher Hite declined to immediately resolve the dispute over Daleiden’s reporting credentials. He denied Daleiden’s motion because Daleiden “was engaged in criminal activity irrespective of his journalistic status.”
Daleiden has never worked as a journalist, and state prosecutors insist he doesn’t qualify for Shield Law protections. Some of the nation’s foremost journalists and journalism scholars said in a 2016 court filing that Daleiden wasn’t acting as a journalist in secretly recording abortion care providers. The videos served as pretext for Republican lawmakers in some states to defund Planned Parenthood. The man who killed three people at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood facility in 2015 repeated talking points from Daleiden’s videos.
“Even assuming Daleiden was a journalist at the time of the recordings his actions would not be protected by the California Shield Law or the Federal Privacy Protection Act under the circumstances alleged in the search warrant,” Hite ruled. “While this newfound freedom of information and speech brings about different perspectives and discussions, it does not give either the media or a citizen journalist free reign to violate criminal laws applicable to the general public.”
Posing as executives of a fake fetal tissue procurement company keen on doing business with Planned Parenthood, Daleiden and Merritt filmed abortion providers at the National Abortion Federation’s (NAF) annual meeting in California in 2014 and 2015. Through an anti-choice front group called the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), Daleiden and Merritt released heavily edited videos in 2015 to falsely accuse Planned Parenthood of illegally profiting from the sale of fetal tissue. They face charges of felony invasion of privacy and conspiracy and could go to prison.
Hite’s ruling Tuesday was the clearest indication that he intends to take the case to trial. A day earlier, the defense argued that the people who were filmed had no reasonable expectation of privacy because they were filmed in public, where conversations can be easily overheard.
Daleiden testified he believed he had observed California’s eavesdropping law by filming solely in public places. He and Merritt turned down invitations to meet abortion providers in private despite the likelihood of obtaining better quality footage in the quieter surroundings, he said. “I chose to keep the recordings within the boundaries of the California law as I understood it,” Daleiden said.
But when Deputy Attorney General Johnette Jauron stated that he had stolen data from a Northern California-based fetal tissue company for his investigation, Daleiden struggled to explain himself.
“That’s not true,” he said. Later he elaborated, “I don’t believe I took data away from the company.”
A former employee of StemExpress, a company that uses fetal tissue for research, gave Daleiden the password to her StemExpress email account after she stopped working there. Daleiden accessed her email and downloaded every single message to his laptop’s hard drive.
Matthew Strugar, a First Amendment attorney in Los Angeles who is not affiliated with the case, said Hite had correctly held that the First Amendment doesn’t permit journalists to break the law. “Journalists cannot, for instance, break into someone’s house while pursuing a lead, or run a red light to get to a breaking story,” Strugar told Rewire.News.
But Strugar said the case could have repercussions for legitimate undercover work.
“The threat of this prosecution is in the threat of finding that undercover investigations and recording in place where people could generally overhear your conversation, or in blurring the line so much that journalists or investigators won’t ever record because the threat of prosecution could wax and wane from second to second,” Strugar told Rewire.News.
Melanie Newman, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement that Daleiden and Merritt should face the legal consequences of their “multiyear illegal effort to manufacture a fake smear campaign against Planned Parenthood.”
“They broke the law to try and prevent Planned Parenthood from serving the patients who depend on us and to advance their goal of banning safe, legal abortion in this country. We’re looking forward to justice being served,” Newman said.
Hite has not indicated when he will rule.
Source: https://rewire.news/article/2019/09/18/anti-choice-activist-david-daleiden-gets-bad-news-in-court/
Abortion - Abortion Clinics, Abortion Pill, Abortion Information 
September 20, 2019 at 5:30 pm
Daleiden, like all so-called “pro-lifers,” wants to be a hero on the cheap, to be known for “rescuing” a certain type of victim, and his plan is to do so by ripping the facade off Planned Parenthood.
Why does he– or his ilk– need to be heroes? From the website:
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It was the question philosopher Ernest Becker asked when he considered how nobody wants to die, yet heroes would willingly give their lives.
As a GI who helped liberate a concentration camp in WWII, Becker well knew how desperately humans cling to life in even the most appalling conditions: We fear death even more than we fear the next hour we spend in a hellhole of a life.
So it was that Becker pondered the anomaly of the hero: Why would someone willingly give his life, especially if it was not sacrificed for a relative or a friend, but for his country or a political concept? Surely there was much more to be gained from living than there was from choosing to risk death.
As Becker considered the question, he came to realize that the key to understanding the hero’s willingness to die was to understand that to die was to become nothing– people who knew us would forget us; even those who never forgot us would themselves die, and their memory of us die with them. What we said or expressed would fade in the memories of those who knew us best, what we had owned would be scattered to the corners of humanity, what we wrote would be crushed under others’ scribblings. Our body would decompose, our bones would likely dissolve and mix with the common minerals of the soil in which we were buried, and even our gravestone would crumble to powder in a few centuries. Our whole life, all its wondrous discoveries, its moments of tragedy and victory, its vigor and its daring, its perfectibility and its setbacks, would have as much meaning for those still alive as the mark a twig leaves when it’s dragged through the water.
But, Becker realized, we don’t want it to be like that. And so we seek ways be which we can overcome the nothingness which death forces upon us.
If we cannot come to terms with it, we would be paralyzed by its overwhelming significance. What point is there in living if we only are to vanish, to be forgotten, to lose everything we thought, built, forged, created? Every second of our life would be meaningless, and everything we said, did or thought would be no more than spitting into the abyss. In his book, Denial of Death , Becker said that we shove the unpleasant knowledge into the depths of our mind, where it gnaws away at our ability to function well– what’s the point of planning, working, saving, enjoying, creating, procreating, if it all comes down to nothingness at the end? We plod on, nevertheless, secretly hoping that we’ll live forever. And many (if not most) of us hope to find a way to transcend death, to always be alive to those who follow long after. In this way our life will have a significance greater than death. And it occurs to some of us that if we do something heroic, we will live forever.
And this, said Becker, explains the willingness of a person to be a hero, even if it means dying. His heroic actions will cause him to live on. But how does one become a hero? By winning the acclaim of society. When a person selflessly provides what society expects, he becomes a hero.
In other words, Becker says, to be a hero, one has to pay the price society specifies.
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