Kansas Obstetrician Dr. George Teller has maintained his Wichita area practice for more than 30 years. Anti-choice activists have unsuccessfully tried to shut down his practice, threatening him with intimidation and violence, even shooting the doctor in both arms.
Tiller, who is one of a handful of doctors that performs late term abortions, is facing a new obstacle: a citizen-petitioned grand jury. The anti-choice activists dusted off a statute that is more than 120 years old and originally intended as a tool to fight political corruption in a last ditch effort to shut down Tiller's clinic.
“This is an abuse of the grand jury system,” said Senator John L. Vratil, a Republican who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee in Topeka. “It’s being used in a political way to further a political cause, and that was never the purpose of the grand jury system in Kansas.”
According to today's New York Times,
Kansas lawmakers adopted the provision allowing grand juries by petition in the late 19th century when state politicians were fighting over which towns would be named county seats and the lucrative railroad industry was blossoming. The law was seen as a check against abuse by those in power.
In those early years, it required the signatures of 200 taxpayers to call a grand jury; now it requires the signatures of 2 percent of a county’s turnout in the most recent governor’s election, plus 100 more signatures.nside a courthouse along Main Street here, 15 grand jurors have been meeting for months, convened under the statute by ordinary Sedgwick County residents to investigate whether Dr. Tiller’s clinic has illegally performed second- and third-trimester abortions. Their deliberations are scheduled to end next month.
The grand jury meeting here is at least the 10th ordered by petition in the state in recent years: two investigated abortion providers, including Dr. Tiller, and the rest investigated misdemeanor obscenity violations by stores selling explicit videos, magazines and other items. Only one has led to a conviction.
IMO this seems like Ashcroft-style justice in the Heartland, only this time it is even worse than locking up Tommy Chong for selling glass pot pipes on the internet. Nonetheless, the investigation does have its supporters.
“This is a measure for the people to get some justice if law enforcement doesn’t do its job, and that’s exactly what we’re doing,” said David Gittrich, of Kansans for Life, which was involved in both grand jury petitions involving Dr. Tiller and helped collect nearly 7,000 verified signatures, more than double the required number, for the current investigation.
Times staffer Monica Davey reports that Dr. Tiller, 66, who has performed abortions since the 1970s, has long been a focus of controversy in Wichita, where the bland building that houses his clinic belies the debate that has centered around it. Abortion opponents blame Dr. Tiller for drawing women from around the country to have abortions. Abortion-rights advocates point to him as a physician who has persisted even as protesters have gone to his home and church, wrote Davey.
According to Davey, Tiller's lawyer, Lee Thompson, said such critics were “using the grand jury, I believe, as a tool to harass.” Dr. Tiller declined to be interviewed.
Several legal experts wonder where this will all end — how many more grand juries will be created by petition in response to social or political issues, and at what price to the taxpayers?
“This is an important check, and to the extent that it’s used for political purposes as part of some sort of broader agenda, it threatens the viability of the check itself,” said Douglas E. Beloof, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore.
The notion of citizen-petitioned grand juries is not that unusual as 10 states permit it.
In recent times, the highest-profile grand jury by petition was called under a similar law in Oklahoma, another of the six states where legal experts say citizens have used the petition process to seat a grand jury. The petition’s authors suspected officials had overlooked a larger plot in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. After meeting for 18 months, at a cost of about $500,000, that grand jury found no conspiracy plot.
The law was resurrected in Kansas five years ago, reported Davey by pornography opponents who sought to shut down a store selling explicit magazines, videos and toys. Soon, petitions about similar businesses in other parts of the state took off.
Of seven grand juries, six brought misdemeanor charges related to obscenity, said Phillip Cosby, an anti-obscenity activist who has led the petition efforts; only one, from Ellsworth County, led to a conviction, he said. Others have been delayed, though Mr. Cosby said the efforts had nonetheless had a powerful effect. Some stores have simply closed.
Soon, abortion opponents began using the same method. Two grand juries have completed investigations of abortion clinics. Neither has returned an indictment. Officials say they are not yet certain about the court costs of the various investigations.
According to The Times, the grand jury investigation in Wichita, which began in January and must complete its work by next month, is the second to involve Dr. Tiller’s clinic, Women’s Health Care Services. In 2006, abortion opponents collected petitions to investigate the death of a 19-year-old woman with Down syndrome who had undergone an abortion there, reports Davey.
Thompson may have a point about harassing Tiller since the 2006 grand jury did not return an indictment. That did not deter anti-choice activists from empaneling a second grand jury to investigate all late-term abortions at Dr. Tiller’s clinic since July 2003, said Davey.
Separate from the grand jury investigation, Dr. Tiller is facing 19 misdemeanor counts charging that he received second opinions on abortions from a doctor who was not independent of him, as required by state law. Dr. Tiller’s lawyer, Mr. Thompson, denies the charges.
Under Kansas law, abortions at or after 22 weeks of pregnancy are limited to circumstances where a fetus would not be viable or a pregnant woman would otherwise face “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” — words whose interpretation are at the center of the legal debate here. (In 2007, 293 such abortions were performed in Kansas, state records show; in 168 of them, doctors said such an impairment made the abortion necessary, according to the records.)
The Wichita grand jury requested the medical records of some of Dr. Tiller’s patients, an issue that sent the case to the Kansas Supreme Court. There, patients objected to their records being revealed and Dr. Tiller’s lawyers contended that citizen-petitioned grand juries were being used as a form of harassment and were a violation of the separation of powers.
In May, the State Supreme Court permitted grand jurors to proceed and allowed them to subpoena some records, under the supervision of a district court judge, but with a caveat:
The court “should satisfy itself that the grand jury has not engaged in an arbitrary fishing expedition and that the targets were not selected and subpoenas issued out of malice or with intent to harass.”
Anti-choice activists deny trying to influence the grand jury but still erected a billboard in Witchita which asked “Is Tiller above the law?” Advocates for abortion rights say the billboard is aimed at members of the grand jury; those opposed to abortion deny the claim.
But in Johnson County, outside Kansas City, earlier this year, a grand jury ended its petition-initiated investigation into Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri with no indictments. It did issue a statement, however, in which members revealed reservations about the grand jury’s very existence.
“It is the feeling of this grand jury that the current statute that addresses the formation of a grand jury be evaluated as to evidence required to call the grand jury,” the statement said. “The grand jury also feels that the statute also be re-evaluated as to the percentage of the population required to convene a grand jury.”
The heavy-handed tactic of abortion opponents has turned many staunch Republicans into Democrats. Indeed, one of them, Paul Morrison, defeated radical attorney general Phil Kline in 2006 after Kline had tried to strong-arm Tiller and other abortion providers.
According to Wikipaedia:
In 2003, Kline began investigating possible cases of child rape and illegal partial-birth and late-term abortions. In doing so, Kline requested the medical records of 90 women and girls who either gave birth to a child or had an abortion. As of October 2006, the 90 subpoenaed medical records remain sealed.
On December 21, 2006, Kline charged Tiller with more than 30 misdemeanors, most involving abortions Tiller allegedly performed on minors. But just hours after the charges were unsealed, a Sedgwick County judge threw them out "at the request of Sedgwick County District Attorney Nola Foulston, who said her office had not been consulted by Kline." However, on June 28, 2007, a 19-count indictment was unexpectedly filed against Tiller by Kline's successor, Paul Morrison.
The zeal in which Kline pushed for a prosecution of Tiller alienated many Kansas voters and also forced Kline and the state to spend taxpayer money to defend his tactics.
In a related matter, Kline was named a defendant in a suit brought in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas challenging a state law requiring "doctors and other professionals" to report "all consensual underage sexual activity as sexual abuse."On April 18, 2006, Judge J. Thomas Marten agreed and issued a permanent injunction, ruling that such a policy was contrary to state law.
Snip.
That did not stop Kline from engaging in a fishing expedition of abortion provider records, in violation of federal privacy laws.
In 2006, Operation Rescue and Phil Kline claimed that an alleged rapist was captured with the help of abortion clinic medical records subpoenaed as a result of Kline's investigation.The District Attorney who prosecuted Estrada challenged Operation Rescue's claims, stating that Kline and the records had no involvement in the prosecution.
Kansas may not be in play yet for this year's presidential election, but right now favorite son Barack Obama is within 10 points of John McCain. For historical reference, John Kerry lost Kansas by 25 points to George W. Bush in 2004.
Likewise, Democratic candidate for Senate Jim Slattery is also within 10 points of Pat "slow walk Phase II" Roberts.
Factoring in wing nuts like Kline and the horrible Rev. Fred "I hate fags" Phelps who has protested at the Matthew Shephard funeral in Wyoming in 1998 and at numerous funerals for fallen soliders killed in Iraqi and Afghanistan. Phelps and his ilk claim the soldier's deaths are retribution for American's tolerance for homosexuals.
Even if Obama selects Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius as his running mate, it may not be enough to deliver the state to the Democrats. IMO a few more nut jobs like Phelps and Kline coupled with a complete abuse of the grand jury proceedings (are you listening Ken Starr?) could eventually turn one of the reddest states in the nation blue.
...And THAT would be something.