Federal jury rules against Daleiden

A group of pro-life activists said they will appeal a judgment against them for surreptitiously recording Planned Parenthood associates talking about the harvest and sale of aborted babies’ body parts. The Center for Medical Progress (CMP), led by David Daleiden, conducted a 30-month hidden-camera investigation that exposed atrocities against unborn children, including altering abortion procedures to get the best possible specimens for research. Planned Parenthood sued CMP, Daleiden, and some of his fellow activists for fraud, illegal recording, and breaking confidentiality agreements, but the abortion giant did not dispute the content of the videos. The defendants face the prospect of paying between $1.3 million and $2.3 million in damages.

Did Daleiden get a fair trial? During the six weeks of proceedings, U.S. District Judge William Orrick, who has known ties to Planned Parenthood, barred the jury from seeing nearly all of CMP’s videos. The videos would have shown talks with Planned Parenthood personnel taking place in public settings, a defense against California’s two-party consent law on recording conversations. Orrick also repeatedly cut off the defense’s questioning when it implicated Planned Parenthood’s for selling tissue from aborted babies, calling it “a matter of dispute between the parties in the world outside this courtroom.” After the announcement of the verdict Friday, Daleiden called the trial a dangerous attack on the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and its freedom of speech protections.

Dig deeper: Read Mary Jackson’s coverage of the trial in Vitals.

WORLD has updated this report to reflect the defendants’ intent to appeal.