[Kate Quiñones, a graduate of Hillsdale College, is a staff writer for Catholic News Agency and a fellow of the College Fix. The following article was published on January 30, 2025 (www.catholicnewsagency.com) and is reprinted with permission.]

The state of California has agreed to a plea deal with pro-life activists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt this week after a yearslong criminal prosecution of the two journalists.

State prosecutors launched the probe following the release of a series of undercover videos that appeared to implicate Planned Parenthood officials and the National Abortion Federation in the illegal sale of unborn baby parts.

On Monday, Daleiden and Merritt pleaded “no contest” to one charge of unlawful recording of confidential communication in exchange for the dropping of several felony charges.

As part of the plea deal, Daleiden and Merritt will receive “no jail time, no fines, no admission of wrongdoing, and no probation,” according to a Monday announcement by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), a pro-life group founded and headed by Daleiden.

According to the CMP, the terms of the plea deal mean the pair will face “zero punishment.”

“The new ‘no contest’ plea — which cannot be used adversely—will be entered into judgment as a misdemeanor in six to 12 months and then converted to a ‘not guilty’ plea, dismissed, and expunged,” CMP said in a statement.

Daleiden welcomed this week’s settlement as a “huge victory” and noted that he planned to continue his pro-life work.

“After enduring nine years of weaponized political prosecution, putting an end to the lawfare launched by Kamala Harris is a huge victory for my investigative reporting and for the public’s right to know the truth about Planned Parenthood’s sale of aborted baby body parts,” Daleiden said in a statement Monday.

“Now we all must get to work to protect families and infants from the criminal abortion-industrial complex,” Daleiden said.

When CMP in 2015 released the incriminating videos that showed Planned Parenthood officials discussing the selling of baby body parts, California officials launched the investigation into Daleiden and Merritt.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris—then California’s Democrat attorney general — met with Planned Parenthood staff before ordering criminal investigations into Merritt and Daleiden, including a raid on Daleiden’s home.

California’s next attorney general, Xavier Becerra—who went on to become the director of the Department of Health and Human Services under the Biden administration—charged the two with 14 felony counts of unlawfully recording a conversation and one felony count of criminal conspiracy.

In 2019, a California judge ruled that only nine of the 15 charges could be brought to trial. The case never went to trial amid delays. In a separate civil case in 2019, a federal jury awarded Planned Parenthood over $2 million in damages. Daleiden and Merritt appealed to the 9th Circuit, which upheld the jury’s findings.

Steve Cooley, the former Los Angeles County district attorney who led Daleiden’s legal defense team, called the prosecution “vindictive.”

“In my five decades as an attorney, 40 years of which were as a prosecutor, I have never seen such a blatant exercise of selective investigation and vindictive prosecution,” Cooley said in a Jan. 27 statement.

“The California attorneys general who initiated this case and pursued it for nearly 10 years should be ashamed for weaponizing their office to pursue people who were merely exposing illegality associated with the harvesting and sale of fetal body parts,” Daleiden’s lawyer said.

Though Daleiden and Merritt were neither convicted nor found guilty, the state of California stated on Tuesday that California Attorney General Rob Bonta secured a “felony conviction” of Daleiden and Merritt.

Attorney General Bonta said his “office is securing criminal convictions to ensure that Californians can exercise their constitutional rights to reproductive health care” in a Jan. 28 press release.

But Daleiden said the statement is a misrepresentation of the case.

“The attorney general’s press release misrepresents our agreement,” Daleiden told CNA. “The judge explicitly stated at the hearing yesterday that we would only be ‘convicted’ and ‘found guilty’ if we break the agreement.”

The attorney from Liberty Counsel who represented Merritt called the deal “essentially a complete victory for Merritt,” who was initially charged with 16 felonies and faced more than 10 years in prison. With the plea deal, the charges will be dropped and she will receive no prison time.

“The plea agreement ends an unjust criminal case by dropping these baseless criminal charges without any prison time, fines, or other penalties,” Mat Staver, Liberty Counsel founder and chairman, said in a statement.

“Sandra deserves to be applauded and acclaimed for revealing these horrors and then enduring this selective and vindictive prosecution as a result,” Staver continued. “Murdering human babies to harvest their body parts for profit is evil and there is no excuse for Sandra’s political persecution.”

Daleiden plans to continue exposing injustices in the abortion industry.

“Taking the San Francisco case off the board allows me to focus fully on CMP’s mission to report on the injustices of taxpayer-funded experiments on aborted babies and continue to expand our groundbreaking investigative reporting,” Daleiden said.