Can someone explain to me what crime was committed by making this video? Does this mean that all the animal rights activists who break into animal farms and film the supposed torture have been breaking laws all this time?
Un fucking real how upside down society has become. A woman speaks on the video about carefully placing the upper or lower crunch so as to not damage organs, and the guy who films it ends up behind bars?
For Houston prosecutors, the crucial evidence that turned a criminal investigation into Planned Parenthood into a probe of the group’s critics was two forged California driver’s licenses with phony names.
The fake licenses were used by two antiabortion activists, David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, to gain access to a Planned Parenthood conference in Houston last April in order to make an undercover video intended to show that the organization was engaged in the illegal sale of fetal tissue for abortions.
But apparently unknown to the activists, Planned Parenthood security guards had scanned the licenses — and photographed the two activists using them as they entered the conference.
When Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson launched an investigation into Planned Parenthood last summer — amid a political outcry spurred by the videos — one of the group’s lawyers, Josh Schaffer, met with the prosecutors and turned over copies of the fake IDs.
The phony licenses with fake names (“Robert Daoud Sarkis” for Daleiden and “Susan Sarah Tennenbaum” for Merritt) are dated in 2009 and 2010, respectively, according to copies obtained by Yahoo News on Tuesday. The documents then became the basis for criminal indictments against the two antiabortion activists that a grand jury returned late Monday. The charge against them: tampering with a governmental record, a felony that is punishable by between two and 20 years in prison, under Texas law.
“This is not your teenage kidpresenting a fake ID to get a six-pack of beer,” Schaffer told Yahoo News in an interview. “What elevates this is the intention to defraud and harm another.”
Daleiden was also charged with a misdemeanor relating to the purchase and sale of human organs, according to a statement by the district attorney. No charges are to be filed against Planned Parenthood, the original target of the probe.
Schaffer described how from the outset of the probe, he and Planned Parenthood fully cooperated with investigators. “I met with the prosecutors,” he said. “We gave them a tour of the facility, and we turned over a slew of documents.”
But even after receiving the phony driver’s licenses, the prosecutors and agents on the case were stumped by one issue: They had the phony name that Merritt had used on the driver’s license — “Susan Tennenbaum” — but they didn’t know her true identity, Schaffer said. And when they questioned Daleiden, Schaffer said he learned from the prosecutors, the antiabortion activist refused to tell them.
Then, just this month, there was a breakthrough: Daleiden was being deposed in California for an unrelated civil suit brought by a fetal tissue provider. In the suit, he was asked about his colleague, and he was forced, under oath, to identify her as Merritt. Schaffer got a hold of a transcript of the deposition, and it allowed Planned Parenthood to file its own civil suit earlier this month against the two activists, the group they were working for — the Center for Medical Progress, an antiabortion organization in Irvine, Calif. — and four associates.
Among the allegations in the suit: that Daleiden, the Center for Medical Progress’s chief executive officer, and Merritt created a fake fetal tissue company with phony business cards to carry off their ruse. And that, as part of the plan, Merritt even created a fake Facebook page with “likes” that included Hillary Clinton and “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
Daleiden and Merritt couldn’t be reached for comment Tuesday. But in a statement on the Center for Medical Progress’s website, the group said, “The Center for Medical Progress uses the same undercover techniques that investigative journalists have used for decades in exercising our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and of the press, and follows all applicable laws. We respect the processes of the Harris County District Attorney, and note that buying fetal tissue requires a seller as well. Planned Parenthood still cannot deny the admissions from their leadership about fetal organ sales captured on video for all the world to see.”
So far,
eight US states have passed
"ag-gag" laws, making documentation of what happens on ranches and farms without the owner's written consent a crime.
State representative Joe Schmick (R-Colfax) would like Washington to become the ninth. On Monday, he introduced
House Bill 1104, titled "creating the crime of interference with agricultural production."
Ag-gag bills, which are
spreading through the US partly thanks to the Koch brothers–backed American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC, also known as the
"corporate bill mill"), would essentially criminalize those slaughterhouse videos that have probably done more to popularize vegetarianism and veganism than anything else in the US.
"I view it as a way to protect the farmer," Rep. Schmick was quoted as saying in the
Capital Press. "You can edit anything to make it look really bad." (Rep. Schmick has ties to ALEC and, as of 2010, was listed as a member of its national
"energy, environment, and agriculture task force.")
Activists and independent investigators say undercover video is necessary to keep the agriculture industry in check where government inspections fail to do the job—and that instead of hurting the farmer, they're a way to protect the public. In 2008, such video led to
the largest beef recall in US history when someone took video of "downer" cattle being processed for human consumption—including sales to school lunch programs—despite the USDA's insistence that it had been
"continuously" monitoring the Westland/Hallmark Meat Packing Company, which had passed 17 independent audits a few years prior. (The company eventually agreed on a $500 million settlement.)
But even if you disregard the value of undercover work, the laws have been applied to arrest and prosecute people who've
filmed or photographed agricultural facilities from public roads, documenting nothing more than what is in
plain view. (In the 1984 case
Oliver v. United States, the Supreme Court wrote: "Open fields do not provide the setting for those intimate activities that the Amendment is intended to shelter from government interference or surveillance. There is no societal interest in protecting the privacy of those activities, such as the cultivation of crops, that occur in open fields.") In the first ever ag-gag case—which involved filming from a public road—prosecutors eventually moved to
drop the charges after reporters picked up the story.
Journalist (and recently announced
TED senior fellow) Will Potter has been following ag-gag laws as they've popped up in state legislatures. You can read lots more about them—where they came from, how they're used—over on his site
Green Is the New Red.
For now, we'll have to wait and see how the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives does with HB 1104.
