Legal News

Community Using Grand-Jury-by-Petition to Investigate Abortion Doc

By Dan Slater

In Kansas, one of the few states to allow residents to force a grand jury investigation, a late-term abortion doc has become a target of the novel legal tactic.

On the front-page of today’s NYT, Monica Davey reports that, since January, a grand jury in Sedgwick County has been meeting to investigate whether the clinic belonging to Dr. George Tiller (pictured), Women’s Health Care Services, has illegally performed second- and third-trimester abortions. Their deliberations are scheduled to end next month.

“This is an abuse of the grand jury system,” Senator John L. Vratil, a Republican who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee in Topeka (and a Lathrop & Gage partner), told the Times. “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.”

Kansas lawmakers, reports the Times, adopted the provision allowing grand juries by petition in the late 19th century when state politicians were fighting over such hot-button issues as which towns would be named county seats. The law was seen as a check against abuse by those in power. Then, it required the signatures of 200 taxpayers to call a grand jury; now it requires the signatures of 2% of a county’s turnout in the most recent governor’s election, plus 100 more signatures.

Tiller’s lawyer, Lee Thompson, said his critics were using the grand jury “as a tool to harass.”

“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 Oregon.

Some on the other side of the abortion debate disagree. “This is a measure for the people to get some justice if law enforcement doesn’t do its job,” said David Gittrich, of Kansans for Life, “and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 17, 2008 (boomark / email).