Kermit Gosnell Trial: Judge Throws Out Three Murder Charges
A judge in the Kermit Gosnell murder trial has thrown out three murder charges against the abortion doctor accused of running a “house of horrors,” finding that there was no proof the infants in question were born alive and then killed.
The 72-year-old Gosnell faces the death penalty for murdering four infants at his clinic where he is accused of performing late-term abortions. Prosecutors sat that Kermit Gosnell delivered the babies alive after mothers came to his clinic for abortions and then severed their necks with scissors to kill them.
Gosnell faces the death penalty if convicted of killing four other infants and causing the death of a patient who suffered a drug overdose in his care.
Judge Jeffrey Minehart did not explain why he granted the motion to drop the three charges after more than a month of prosecution testimony. Staff at Gosnell’s clinic had testified that they saw the babies moving or breathing, but the defense argued that they saw only a single movement or breath.
“These are not the movements of a live child,” attorney Jack McMahon said. “There is not one piece — not one — of objective, scientific evidence that anyone was born alive.”
The jury is also listening to charges that in 2009, Kermit Gosnell administered an overdose of drugs to 41-year-old Karnamaya Mongar, a recent immigrant who died after visiting his Women’s Medical Society. McMahon argued that the charge of third-degree malice requires “conscious disregard” for life.
“She wasn’t treated any differently than any of the other thousands of other people who went through there,” McMahon said.
The Gosnell case going on Pennsylvania has garnered little attention from the mainstream media, save a few publications. Conor Fridersdorf, a writer for The Atlantic, admitted that he hadn’t even heard about the case until earlier in the month but was shocked at reading details about it.
In a lengthy article he wrote about the Kermit Gosnell case, Friedersdorf refers to the grand jury report against the 72-year-old Gosnell.
The document read:
“This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors. The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels — and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths.”
Other charges have been dropped in the Kermit Gosnell trial. Minehart agreed to dismiss charges that the doctor abused a corpse after removing the feet and storing fetuses in specimen jars. McMahon argued that Gosnell did so to preserve DNA samples.
