Pro-Lifer Wins After 8-Year Prosecution for Exposing Planned Parenthood Sale of Baby Body Parts

After eight years of being prosecuted for making undercover videos about Planned Parenthood, a pro-life activist is finally walking free.

The California Attorney General's office agreed to a plea deal to end its criminal case against Sandra Merritt for her role in the undercover journalism that exposed Planned Parenthood's trade in aborted baby body parts. 

"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," said Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver.

As CBN News reported, Merritt and journalist David Daleiden, were activists with The Center for Medical Progress. In 2015, they released shocking undercover videos exposing the abortion industry's illegal practice of harvesting and selling baby 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," Liberty Counsel, a non-profit legal group that represented Merritt, explains in a statement.

After the videos were released, then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris met with top Planned Parenthood officials in 2016 and ordered criminal investigations into Merritt and Daleiden while the next state attorney general, Xavier Becerra, eventually charged them with violating California's recording law. 

Merritt and Daleiden were charged with tampering with a governmental record and using fake IDs while carrying out their undercover investigation – a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

In 2017, Daleiden said the charges had little to do with their work as journalists and were solely a political move. "This is a politically motivated prosecution," he said. "And this is discriminatory against pro-life Americans..."

Liberty Counsel has defended Merritt against California's and Planned Parenthood's "two-pronged strategy" of criminal indictments and a civil lawsuit. 

The legal group was able to negotiate a plea agreement which includes the state dropping all remaining felony counts. She will plead "no contest" to a single 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," Liberty Counsel said in a statement. 

Staver added, "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."

Staver added that "there is no excuse for Sandra's political persecution."

"The State of California deserves to walk away virtually empty-handed," he said.

Merritt's settlement comes just days after the new Trump Justice Department released a directive instructing federal prosecutors to limit the enforcement of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. The move comes after the Biden Administration used the law to imprison multiple peaceful pro-life activists. 

The memo, penned by Chad Mizelle, chief of staff to the attorney general, said the act should only be enforced under "extraordinary circumstances." 

"Until further notice, no new abortion-related FACE Act actions — criminal or civil — will be permitted without authorization from the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division," Mizelle wrote. 

Mizelle also instructed that the department drop three pending actions against activists involved in abortion clinic civil disobedience in Ohio, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania. 

"President Donald Trump campaigned on the promise of ending the weaponization of the federal government and has recently directed all federal departments and agencies to identify and correct the past weaponization of law enforcement," Mizelle wrote in the memo. "To many Americans, prosecutions and civil actions under the (FACE Act) have been the prototypical example of this weaponization. And for good reason." 

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