A grand jury in Johnson County, Kansas, has refused to indict a Planned Parenthood clinic in Overland Park on charges that it violated restrictions on the procedure.
Abortion opponents, through a petition, had forced the court to convene the panel and investigate the clinic in Overland Park, Kan., to determine whether it violated laws on parental notice and informed consent.
They also wanted to see whether the clinic was illegally trafficking in fetal tissue.
”We are once again vindicated, as we have been any time there is an objective review of these allegations,” said Peter Brownlie, president and chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri. ”The jury investigated all of the allegations that were in the petition that resulted in the grand jury being formed, and they found no evidence of any wrongdoing.”
Said Planned Parenthood attorney Pedro Irigonegaray: ”It gives me great faith in the justice system and the people of Kansas.”
That’s the good news. The bad news is, this isn’t over, not by a longshot. The District Attorney in Johnson County is none other than Phill Kline, infamous for his pantysniffing fishing expedition into the sex lives of Kansas’ women. While he served as Attorney General for the state, he reinterpreted state law to require a wide variety of medical and school personnel to report all instances of “intimate contact” between consenting teens (even though he had a hard time defining just what comprised such contact, and got soundly smacked down by the federal court for his trouble); filed a lawsuit against the governor trying to ban the use of Medicaid funds to pay for abortions; attempted (unsuccessfully) to get the private medical records of thousands of women who had had late-term abortions in Dr. George Tiller’s clinic in Wichita, one of the few that is authorized to conduct the procedure — with the justification that he was looking for instances where the clinic failed to report statutory rape. Happily, Kansas voters had enough of Kline and bounced him in the last election — though he wound up as Johnson County’s district attorney, from which position he promptly launched an investigation of Planned Parenthood in Overland Park.
And defeat? Defeat means nothing to Kline and his ilk. When they lose, they simply persist; if persistence doesn’t pay off, they change tactics. And of course, if the law won’t help them out, they’re perfectly happy to engage in terrorism.
Do these sound like people who have accepted defeat?
”Planned Parenthood cannot claim they are free of any indictment, because the full evidence never reached the grand jury,” said Tim Golba, spokesman for the LIFE Coalition, the anti-abortion collaborative that petitioned for the grand jury.
The jurors issued a subpoena in January seeking the records of 16 clinic patients, but Planned Parenthood feared information in the records would identify the patients.
Johnson County District Attorney Phill Kline, who has started his own investigation into Planned Parenthood, asked District Judge Kevin Moriarty to make the agency and its clinic abide by the subpoena…
Cheryl Sullenger, spokeswoman for Operation Rescue, one of the groups in the LIFE Coalition, said she wasn’t surprised by the grand jury’s decision. Jurors didn’t appear to seriously investigate all of the allegations, she said.
”We’ve been considering a second grand jury effort,” Sullenger said. ”That’s something that’s on the table right now.”
Not that the people at Planned Parenthood are surprised:
Brownlie said he expected abortion opponents to claim the grand jury’s work was tainted.
”Any time a decision is different from the one they want, they will claim it’s because of some nefarious doings,” he said. ”The only people who continue to insist that there’s criminal wrongdoing are people who have a political agenda.”
UPDATE: As Thomas reminded me, Kline was caught out last fall — seems that he doesn’t actually live in Johnson County, which might be a wee bit of a problem for him, seeing as how he’s supposed to live in the county in which he is DA. Whoops.