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“They say that courage is the willingness to stand for your conscience even if it means that you're standing alone."
"Members of the Jury, along with her fellow investigators, Sandra Susan Merritt took a stand for her conscience to investigate the giant corporation that is Planned Parenthood and to report to the authorities and to the public the ghastly and horrific practices that it had in selling human organs. Now, at the end of this exhausting six week trial, it's my duty and my privilege to ask you to stand on your conscience and to deliver the only just verdict here, which is a complete defense verdict on all counts.”
- Defense Attorney Horatio Mihet
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[From our courtroom correspondent]
Harmeet Dhillon, for the Defense, opened on Wednesday, the last day of the trial. Her closing arguments drew attention to the “short-cuts” Planned Parenthood took throughout the course of the trial and with their supposedly secure conferences. Those short-cuts, she said, included name-calling. She referenced Planned Parenthood’s Rhonda Trotter’s closing arguments in which she repeatedly called all the defendants “liars.” Planned Parenthood wanted to vilify those who exposed their “inadequate business procedures,” Dhillon said, but those short-cuts wouldn’t work anymore because, in trial, it’s the “cold hard facts” that matter.
Planned Parenthood claims that Center for Medical Progress (CMP) violated its conference exhibitor agreements when investigators paid for a booth and exhibited as if they were a tissue procurement company. They also claim that CMP investigators violated the National Abortion Federation (NAF) confidentiality agreements and confidentiality agreements they signed before meeting with Planned Parenthood executives at facilities in Texas and Colorado. They say that the defendants should pay for their security upgrades they installed after they discovered the investigators released the videos because the defendants violated the contracts. Dhillon went through the contracts and the claims step-by-step to show how Planned Parenthood’s claims fail.
The Planned Parenthood conference agreements don’t discuss behavior after the conference, Dhillon argued. Rather, they refer to behavior at the conference, prohibiting what might annoy other conference attendees at the time. CMP investigators abided by the contracts. The other contracts were disposed of just as quickly – especially since the plaintiff Planned Parenthood affiliates are not parties or even third-party beneficiaries to the NAF contracts. The two parties of the contracts are NAF and the investigators. Other attendees are, perhaps, third-party beneficiaries to those contracts. The employers of the other attendees, the plaintiff Planned Parenthood affiliates are, at best, fourth-party beneficiaries.
An additional reason for the jury to award no damages for security upgrades on the basis of the allegedly violated contracts is the fact that Planned Parenthood provided no baseline for what their usual security costs are. They put into evidence invoices for what they spent after the videos came out and say that the defendants should pay for all of it – but there’s no evidence that it was a greater cost than usual or how much greater than usual. The jury has no evidence from which to decide how much Planned Parenthood’s security costs increased. It is “fatal to their claims” that they provided no evidence, Dhillon said. Jurors are not allowed to guess and, as they have no evidence, they can’t allot anything.
“Plaintiffs have the burden of proof” to show “the reasonability of their claims,” but they “skipped over” that, Dhillon said. Plaintiffs have a responsibility to restrict their expenditures, but they showed no evidence that their expenditures were reasonable or restricted. On the contrary, their COO, Melvin Galloway, who authorized the expenditures, said that he had only been on the job with Planned Parenthood for three months and didn’t know what was normal.
The fact that Planned Parenthood assumed that everyone who registered for their conferences was pro-choice is Planned Parenthood’s problem, not the defendants’, Dhillon said. Rather than admitting that they failed to vet their conference attendees to only admit those who agreed with them, they played “the blame game.” Her slide showed about eight Planned Parenthood witnesses who had been asked about their part in letting the CMP investigators into the conferences. Each of them had pointed the finger at one or more of their colleagues and blamed someone else rather than take responsibility. The chain of blame led back to the first conference the CMP investigators had attended – a conference which didn’t even purport to require vetting of attendees.
Dhillon also went on to describe the fake IDs which are at the center of the RICO claims. David Daleiden testified that he made an ID on his home computer, purposely using an expired date and an invalid number. He tried it out on a nightclub bouncer who wasn’t fooled and he also phoned the Huntington Beach police, and asked them about making such an ID for a film project. They said it was fine as long as he didn’t try to fool law enforcement with it. Then, satisfied that he was not violating the law, he used it, when necessary, at abortion conference check-ins. His testimony, Dhillon said, was unrebutted. Further, someone is guilty of RICO only if there is a “pattern” of certain crimes, such as creating or transferring fake IDs. There was certainly no “pattern” in this case.
She went through a long flow chart with 39 elements that Planned Parenthood must prove in order to prevail on their RICO claims. She named multiple elements that were missing and said that Planned Parenthood was attempting to prove RICO by tossing a “word salad” in front of the jury, loaded with RICO phrases. If evidence is missing, if the chain is broken, as it obviously was, Dhillon said, the jury must rule in favor of the defense. Trial is about facts, and the plaintiffs don’t get to “play to your emotions.”
Paul Jonna followed, speaking on behalf of defendant Adrian Lopez, one of the undercover investigators who worked for CMP. He noted that the plaintiffs had made only passing references to Lopez in their emotional closing arguments because he didn’t fit into “their narrative.” Adrian testified that he was working at Starbucks and taking odd jobs to support his grandmother when he was hired to go undercover. He doesn’t consider himself pro-life, but Daleiden showed Lopez enough evidence to make him believe that Planned Parenthood was hiding something that needed to be exposed. He believed that Planned Parenthood was killing babies born alive.
Jonna pointed out that Planned Parenthood was asking the jury to “rubber stamp their verdict form” without examining the evidence and defenses of every defendant. He said that Trotter’s and Kamras’s closing statements yesterday “glossed over the details” because they didn’t have evidence for their claims, certainly not against Lopez. They want the jury to find Lopez liable for a RICO conspiracy – which hinges on the fake IDs - when he used his own ID at conferences and testified that he didn’t know that Daleiden had a fake ID, Jonna said. Lopez’s testimony is unrebutted.
Jonna also listed all the supposed “recording victims” who didn’t testify and on whose behalf Planned Parenthood is suing. Planned Parenthood produced no video or testimony to support the claim that the people were recorded, but is asking the jury to find the defendants liable for damages for illegally recording them.
Vladimir Kozina spoke on behalf of defendant Troy Newman. Newman was “a colleague, not a conspirator,” he said, and “just one of many colleagues.” Although on CMP’s board, Mr. Newman did not vote to create the front company that exhibited at the abortion conferences and “didn’t even know about it.” Again, Kozina said that the plaintiffs were trying to get the jury to find all the defendants liable without the least evidence against some of them. In a sing-song voice he described their attempts as, “Broad brush, broad brush, let’s try to make it look dirty.”
Catherine Short spoke on behalf of defendant Albin Rhomberg. The plaintiffs say that he was part of a RICO conspiracy because he agreed to be on the CMP board, he knew about the general idea for the project of undercover filming, and he supported it. Tricking people is not a crime and there are many, many ways to film people without their knowledge that are not illegal, she pointed out. He had no knowledge of the fake IDs because Daleiden kept everything very secret, she said, and he never conspired about anything illegal.
Short also pointed out a major flaw in the timeline. Planned Parenthood is asking the defendants to cover the security they implemented after the release of the first video of the lunch meeting with Dr. Deborah Nucatola. They allege defendants trespassed and breached Planned Parenthood’s exhibitor agreements during the undercover project and hence defendants owe damages for security because their illegal behavior. But none of the incidents of alleged trespassing and breaching of agreements had happened when they filmed Nucatola. The recording of the lunch meeting took place a year before it was released. She was the one who helped them get into later conferences and meetings where the plaintiffs allege defendants committed trespassing and fraudulent promise.
Short said that defendants had no evidence that Rhomberg was part of the alleged conspiracy. Then why would Planned Parenthood be hammering him with this lawsuit? She answered her question for the jury: Rhomberg “has been a thorn in Planned Parenthood’s side for decades and they see this as an opportunity to pull that thorn out and crush it.”
Horatio Mihet finished the closing arguments for defendants speaking on behalf of defendant Sandra Merritt. He gave an impassioned speech for the right to follow one’s conscience, arguing that Merritt had merely followed her conscience in working to expose Planned Parenthood. He said that the jury was the conscience of the community.
He said that Planned Parenthood had flown in all sorts of witnesses to say how scared they were after the video came out but they were “silent on the things that matter.” He vehemently contested Trotter’s characterization of the defendants as liars, and drew attention to the times the plaintiffs had to change their testimony when presented with hard evidence. He said that, when in front of the jury, the Planned Parenthood witnesses “cried crocodile tears,” but back when they were negotiating over body parts with CMP investigators and no jury was watching, they were “cold and calculating.” He asked the jury to return a just verdict that is consistent with their consciences and the law.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys and the judge looked tense and concerned after defense finished.
Trotter and Kamras both spoke again on behalf of plaintiffs. They spoke slowly, as if unsure of how to rebut the defendants’ closing. They chose “distractions” as their theme and tried to convince the jury that the defense arguments were merely meant to distract them. Kamras showed a chart of NAF’s “statistics” of “anti-abortion violence” against abortion providers and cried against the “audacity” of Mihet to question the “sincerity of their experience.” The chart had been produced earlier in the trial and, on cross-examination, shown to be worthless from a statistical point of view. Kamras finished by quoting abortionist Leslie Drummond-Hay who said how scared she was when the videos came out.
Judge Orrick then gave the jurors their final instructions about choosing a presider and coming to a unanimous verdict. They left to begin deliberations shortly after 11 o’clock.
ADDITIONAL COVERAGE
LifeSiteNews wraps up the six week trial and summarizes the day’s activities here.
Live Action News gives their read on the final day in court here.