CA Drops Prosecution Against Sandra Merritt, Who Exposed Planned Parenthood Aborted Baby Part Sales

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California Drops Prosecution Against Sandra Merritt, Who Exposed Planned Parenthood Aborted Baby Part Sales

LifeNews | Jan 27, 2025

After eight years of prosecuting Sandra Merritt, the California Attorney General’s office agreed to a plea deal to end this criminal case with no prison time and no fines for her role in the undercover journalism and videos that exposed Planned Parenthood’s trade in aborted baby body parts.

Before this unprecedented case, the State of California had never criminally prosecuted undercover journalists for surreptitious recordings made in the public interest. Yet, this courageous grandmother was charged with 16 felonies and faced more than 10 years in prison for shining a light on the abortion industry’s profit from illegal organ harvesting from aborted babies.

Liberty Counsel has defended Merritt for more than a decade against California’s and Planned Parenthood’s two-pronged strategy of criminal indictments and a civil lawsuit. The negotiated plea agreement includes the state dropping all remaining felony counts.

Merritt will plead “No Contest” to only one felony charge, which, after a one-year probationary period will be reduced to a misdemeanor at sentencing, and then expunged from her record entirely. Merritt will serve no prison time, will pay no fines, and will have no other penalties imposed for revealing the truth about Planned Parenthood. The deal is essentially a complete victory for Merritt in this politically-motivated criminal case.

Merritt, along with her co-defendant, David Daleiden, the founder of the Center for Medical Progress, produced a series of undercover videos recorded at the National Abortion Federation’s (NAF) 2014 and 2015 abortion convention and trade shows. The videos explicitly show the abortion industry’s illegal abortion practices and sales of human body parts. The recordings capture Planned Parenthood executives haggling over the prices of baby body parts, picking through bloodied arms and legs of aborted babies in a pie tray, and discussing how to alter abortion methods to avoid violating partial-birth abortion law and obtain more profitable body parts to sell.

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

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “Sandra Merritt did nothing wrong. She did the right thing by exposing the depravity of the abortion industry. This plea agreement ends an unjust criminal case by dropping these baseless criminal charges without any prison time, fines or other penalties. Sandra deserves to be applauded and acclaimed for revealing these horrors and then enduring this selective and vindictive prosecution as a result. Murdering human babies to harvest their body parts for profit is evil and there is no excuse for Sandra’s political persecution. This is an extraordinary result for Sandra and the State of California deserves to walk away virtually empty handed.”