Justitia Winked

Artwork by Jeremy Ingle: https://www.facebook.com/OremusPublishing

 

Starting in July of 2015, The Center for Medical Progress released a series of videos which exposed Planned Parenthood’s lucrative sideline of peddling aborted babies’ anatomical remnants. These videos are so shockingly horrific as to be almost unwatchable; millions of Americans did indeed watch them, however, and their ensuing outrage has galvanized a powerful backlash against the taxpayer-funded abortion monolith. Thirteen states have taken steps to block Planned Parenthood’s access to taxpayer funds within their borders; meanwhile, on a federal level, defunding legislation passed in the House and was only narrowly defeated in the Senate.

But Planned Parenthood and their allied institutional powers aren’t taking this lying down. They’ve launched a series of legal attacks both civil and criminal against David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, the investigative journalists who obtained the incriminating footage.

One such attack has been initiated by California’s State Attorney General, Xavier Becerra, a man who has been given both a consistent 100% approval rating and thousands of dollars in campaign funding by Planned Parenthood over the course of his political career. He has charged both Daleiden and Merritt with 15 felony counts.

On Thursday, August 24, Daleiden, Merritt, their legal teams, and a prosecuting attorney convened in Judge Christopher Hite’s San Francisco courtroom. The immediate matters under consideration were Merritt’s Motion to Dismiss fourteen of the fifteen charges against her, and Daleiden’s demurrer objecting to the validity of the charges against him.

Judge Hite rejected Daleiden’s demurrer, stating that it was not the right time to make affirmative defenses, and that Daleiden’s legal team would have a chance to make their case—namely, that the charges against their client are completely lacking in legal legitimacy—at a later stage in the process.

Okay, that’s acceptable. Disappointing? Yes—but it’s not a flagrant miscarriage of justice.

What happened to Sandra Merritt, however, is flat-out wrong—in fact, it’s illegal—and it ought to be of deep concern to all Americans, even those who oppose what she did.

On June 21st, fourteen of the fifteen charges against Daleiden and Merritt were deemed legally insufficient, and were dismissed “with leave to amend”; in plain English, this means the judge allowed the prosecution ten days to file a revised complaint containing additional evidence supporting the charges against the defendants.

The State Attorney General’s office did, indeed, file an amended complaint … against Daleiden. They failed to do so against Merritt. Therefore, according to statute, and even according to his own previous ruling, Judge Hite should have granted Merritt’s Motion to Dismiss this past Thursday.

But he didn’t.

When asked why they failed to file the amended complaint, the prosecuting attorney shrugged and said, “Well, we meant to file it.”

And that’s when things got surreal. Because that’s when Lady Justice lifted her blindfold and winked at the observers. That’s when the judge discarded concrete, codified fact in favor of abstract, amorphous feeling as the criteria by which to adjudicate. That’s when the judge said he believed the prosecution did, in fact, intend to file, and he was therefore denying Merritt’s petition, and giving the prosecution more time to correct their mistake.

When you were a schoolgirl or boy, did your teacher ever give you an A because you meant to do your homework? Was a patient ever healed because a doctor meant to perform a surgery? Was a crime ever punished because an officer meant to make an arrest? And was a baby ever sated because its mother meant to nurse it? Then why on earth would we allow an attorney to continue the taxpayer-funded prosecution of a case because s/he meant to file amended charges, particularly when we as a society have agreed upon statutes that prohibit such an action?

This may not seem like a big deal to you. You may think I’m making a mountain out of a molehill—even some of you who support what Daleiden and Merritt have done. You may be saying to yourself, “Oh, this is a minor infraction on the judge’s part, it won’t prevent Merritt from winning her case.” But that misses the point entirely. This isn’t about whether Merritt wins or loses. This is about the sanctity of the law, and the danger of allowing a fast-and-loose application thereof.

When I was sitting in that courtroom on Thursday, I could not help but think to myself: I have seen this before. I’ve read about judges slowly shifting from reliance upon the letter of the law toward reliance upon the spirit of the culture and age as a basis for forming their decisions. Instead of ruling according to that which had been codified, they began to rule according to popular sentiment. Instead of ruling according to that which was, they began to rule according to that which they felt should be.

Where have I read about this? In the War Crimes Commission’s official report on the trial against the Nazi judges following World War II.

In Nuremburg in 1948, we tried, found guilty, and sentenced to life imprisonment eight Nazi judges for, in part, ignoring and/or exaggerating codified law and adjudicating cases based on their own arbitrary whims. Indeed, after two years under Hitler’s rule, this laissez-faire method of jurisprudence itself began to be codified. The Tribunal notes: “The penal laws were extended in such inclusive and indefinite terms as to vest in the judges the widest discretion in the choice of law to be applied, and in the construction of the chosen law in any given case” (6). They cite the lack of “objective standards” as one of the most problematic factors in the new laws of the Third Reich (7). They conclude:

This new conception of criminal law was a definite encroachment upon the rights of the individual citizen because it subjected him to the arbitrary opinion of the judge … destroyed the feeling of legal security, and created an atmosphere of terrorism. (7)

I admit that giving the prosecution a pass on its blunder and arbitrarily extending the deadline to file amended charges against Sandra Merritt hardly creates “an atmosphere of terrorism.” But back it up, just in that single sentence from the Tribunal. Does what Judge Hite did “destroy the feeling of legal security?” For Sandra Merritt, and anyone else in a similar legal situation, absolutely. Does it subject the individual citizen to the “arbitrary opinion of the judge?” You bet your sweet life it does. Because it does both of those things, it is also a “definite encroachment upon the rights of the individual citizen.”

And that, my friends, is the first step down the slippery slope toward tyranny.

So, you may not think it’s such a big deal that Judge Hite ruled based on the prosecution’s unprovable, and therefore extra-legal, intentions rather than its empirically observed actions, but most Germans didn’t think those early laws restricting Jewish participation in German civic life or that silly little loyalty oath for government employees were such big deals, either. They hardly imagined that ten years later Hitler would be sending Jews to the gas chamber by the millions, or inflicting total war conditions upon his own citizens. So, while they may not have agreed with those early actions, they let them slide. They kept silent and busied themselves with the everydayness of their lives. They didn’t notice the rug being pulled out from under them—it happened so gradually, they never felt the movement beneath their feet until the bombs falling all around them caused the earth itself to quake.

Will you allow their folly to inform your future?

 

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