Following is an excerpt from the closing argument on Tuesday, Nov. 12 in San Francisco federal court by Charles LiMandri, who represents the Center for Medical Progress in the suit brought agains it and David Daleiden by Planned Parenthood. To see full LiMandri argument, go to page 4009 in the attached full transcript for the day.
First, I want to go through some of the basic background that you heard here in court regarding my client.
David Daleiden was himself basically a child of a crisis pregnancy. So you can understand how he would identify with this issue particularly.
He also began working for Live Action in 2008, and since then he has always acted in the capacity as a citizen journalist. This was not his first project in doing that.
Live Action did have various investigative stories published, a regular blog post and in the Weekly Standard. And he, himself, has been a prolific writer throughout his career.
In the Live Action work that he was involved with, there were multi-state undercover audits of Planned Parenthood. Whether they were complying with mandatory reporting laws, for example.
And when he was at Live Action, he started his work in terms of investigation and extensive research on born alive infants and infanticide. As Mr. Breen just pointed out, these are very serious issues and ones that deserve a deep dive into them.
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Now, you heard Ms. Trotter talk about what she called lies that were told both in the course of the undercover investigation and here in court.
Well, of course, in any undercover investigation, by virtue of the fact you’re undercover, you’re going to have to conceal your identity to try to get the full truth told by the people you’re investigating so that can eventually be made known to the public, all of it, in terms of who you are and what you were doing, and who the other side was and what they have been doing in secret. So there is no surprise there….
Here all of the evidence is very heavily weighted when you look at what our client had to consider, including the last person he spoke to is moral theologian Dr. Janet Smith. Different people understanding they have different views about using undercover techniques where you have to misrepresent your identity and misrepresent why you’re there. But if you’re doing it to save human lives and to stop the type of atrocities that we’re talking about here, it’s fully justifiable.
At least that’s the information that he received from the moral theologian and he believed, and I think most people would agree with that.
But regardless of whether everyone agrees with undercover techniques or not, there is no question that Mr. Daleiden and the other defendants had reasonable beliefs that babies were, in fact, being born alive….
If all Planned Parenthood was talking about was contraception and pap smears, nobody cared. If they were just talking about abortion, legal abortion generally, nobody would have cared. But they were talking about illegal activities and that’s what people reacted to.
And the full-length videos were made available online so that people can see them and see what was said in context so that there would be no question they weren’t taking statements out of context.
What news reporting agency does that? Puts all of the footage that they take so people can see it in context? My clients did, so there would be no question that what they’re reporting was both truthful and accurate….
The outcome of this “trial,” is horribly WRONG!! And what will be the future of investigative journalism in America, to expose HORRIFIC CRIMES?? May God help America!
Many years ago, when the filthy “hippie” movement was raging, destroying our universities– I recall reading in the news, all about a large group of over a thousand Baptist teens, signing Chastity pledges! The Catholic Church ought to do the same thing, for our youth! Plus, huge programs in every church, for the St. Louis de Montfort “Total Consecration” to Our Blessed Mother!