Opinion

The persecution of Phill Kline

Jill Stanek Pro-Life Activist
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It is not news that Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry play hardball to achieve their goals politically. Indeed, playing hardball in politics is anticipated. Most do not bat an eye when things get rough — until a line is crossed.

So it is with a legal ethics case brought by the disciplinary administrator of the Kansas Supreme Court against former Kansas Attorney General and Johnson Country District Attorney Phill Kline. Kline’s hearing started today.

Five of the seven justices on the Kansas Supreme Court, which is considered one of the more activist state courts in the country, were appointed by pro-abortion former Governor, and now Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius.

The Court has been engaged in a running battle with lower courts over criminal charges brought by Kline against Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri.

When serving as Johnson Country district attorney in 2007, Kline filed 107 counts, including 23 felonies, against a Johnson Country Planned Parenthood abortion clinic.

Kline charged that the facility was engaged in illegal late-term abortions.

Kline found from subpoenaed documents that Planned Parenthood doctors had repeatedly committed late-term abortions without meeting the law’s criteria in 39 cases. His evidence also revealed that Planned Parenthood had failed to report child rape.

Kline’s case, still alive in the courts today, shook the walls of Planned Parenthood both in Kansas and nationally. It was the first time a prosecutor had brought criminal charges against Planned Parenthood anywhere in the country. Kline became enemy number one. Fearing a national trend as well as loss of federal funding to the entire organization if convicted, Planned Parenthood engaged.

A big supporter of Governor Sebelius, Planned Parenthood has friends on the high court. In fact, even before Kline filed his charges, Justice Carole Beier, a Sebelius appointee and former lawyer with the pro-abortion National Women’s Law Center, called for an ethics investigation of Kline.

Indeed, the Kansas high court is so inclined to wield its power on behalf of the abortion industry that it even silenced a fellow judge who agreed with Kline’s findings, barring his testimony.

Again, the case against Planned Parenthood is ongoing, with three lower court judges now having found probable cause for it to move forward.

But Planned Parenthood wants to scare off any other prosecutors who might come sniffing around. So it wants to make an example of Kline, now a law professor in Virginia, by having its legal allies place on him the equivalent of a political mob hit. They have fabricated ethics complaints against Kline in an effort to have him disbarred from the legal profession.

In ordering an ethics trial, the Kansas Supreme Court’s Disciplinary Administrator’s Office is seeking not only to revoke Kline’s law license but also to send a message to all prosecutors that if they find wrongdoing or illegal activity on the part of Planned Parenthood, it is best to sweep it under the rug.

Most disturbing and embarrassing for the Kansas Supreme Court is that the disciplinary administrator, Stanton Hazlett, openly admitted in a letter to Kline’s appointed attorneys that the Court is pursuing Kline because of his pro-life beliefs.

“We will argue that Mr. Kline’s strong personal anti-abortion beliefs interfered with his judgment in prosecuting abortion clinics,” Hazlett warned.

Given this precedent, one must wonder if ethics proceedings will be brought against US attorneys prosecuting murder or rape cases. After all, I would assume prosecutors are anti-murder and anti-rape.

What nonsense. At the same time, it is proof that this is a witch hunt. What an administration of injustice when the highest court in a state would endorse a lower kangaroo court to proceed.

But the most damning evidence that an arm of the Kansas Supremes is conducting a mafia-like political hit against Kline is that two independent lawyers hired by Hazlett and the Kansas Disciplinary Administrator’s Office to investigate the same ethics complaints filed this statement in 2008 after concluding their 18-month investigation: “After reviewing the substantial documentation in this case, it is the opinion of these investigators that there is not probable cause that Phill Kline violated any of the rules of ethics.”

It is no wonder the American public is fed up with the judicial activism rampant in our court system. The ethics trial against Kline is not only an embarrassment to the fanatically pro-abortion Kansas Supreme Court — guilty, in reality, of the very complaint levied against Kline — it is also a great blow to the concept of justice and the rule of law.

Jill Stanek is a Registered Nurse and founder of the Pro-Life blog www.jillstanek.com.