Murder trial of Philadelphia abortion doctor draws to a close

It’s right in the middle of the courtroom and hard to miss. The worn treatment table with connected stirrup and metal receptacle table comes from the clinic of Philadelphia abortion doctor, Dr Kermit Gosnell.

The 72-year-old doctor is being tried in courtroom 304 of the criminal courts building on Filbert Street in downtown Philadelphia, a room that yesterday was packed for closing statements to the jury. The proceedings were dominated by the defence’s closing statements.

Dr Gosnell is charged with four counts of murder (three murder charges were dropped last week) for allegedly killing viable foetuses while performing abortions.

Prosecutors claim that the doctor killed the foetuses after they aborted by snipping their spinal cords with scissors. The doctor would only have cut the back of the necks of babies to kill them, they claim.

He is also being tried on a charge of third-degree murder over the death of a 41-year-old patient at the Women’s Medical Centre in west Philadelphia in 2009.

The trial, which has lasted more than six weeks, is at the centre of a media storm as anti-abortion pundits have accused the mainstream media of ignoring the case, saying that it highlights their liberal, pro-choice agenda.

“I think there has been a lot of ignoring,” said Fr Frank Provone, national director of Priests For Life, one of a number of anti-abortion groups attending yesterday’s hearing.

“I think the reasons are mixed but the main reason is that we are all uncomfortable about abortion and it’s easy to be that way.”

There was surprise last week when Dr Gosnell decided not to testify or call witnesses. Yesterday his defence attorney sought to unpick the prosecution’s case based on their own evidence.

'Power and rhetoric'
Speaking for more than two hours yesterday, Dr Gosnell's lawyer Jack McMahon portrayed his client as the victim of a public and political witch-hunt.

There had been a “tsunami” and “the most incredible rush to judgment” against the doctor, he said, saying that had been an “irresponsible use of power and rhetoric”.

He urged the jury to be courageous against the court of public opinion and to find that the prosecution case had not been proven and to find his client not guilty.

“This is not a referendum on abortion,” he said, “it is not about whether abortion should or should not be done.”

Dr Gosnell is an abortion doctor, he said, but the case came down to whether he was a murderer.

The attorney argued that there had been “not one piece of objective scientific evidence” shown that any baby was born alive. They had all been killed in utero by a drug administered to the women, he said.

An arm movement, a spasm or a sound from a baby that a number of witnesses claimed to have seen or heard were disputed as signs of life by Dr Gosnell’s attorney, who described the movements as “anecdotal” among thousands of abortions performed at the clinic.

The prosecution’s claim that the doctor had operated a “house of horrors” was “the most extraordinary hype and exaggeration in the history of the criminal justice system,” McMahon argued. He claimed “everyone wants to pigeonhole this case and simplify it”.

Three guilty pleas

Three workers at the clinic had pleaded guilty to third-degree murder because of fear and the power of the government to manipulate witnesses, he claimed. They never snipped the neck of a live baby, he said.

The west Philadelphia clinic at 3801 Lancaster was “not a perfect place by any stretch of the imagination,” he said, but it was not the criminal enterprise that prosecutors claimed it was.

He showed jurors various photographs of a relatively clean waiting room, recovery room and other parts of the clinic, saying that the pictures didn’t lie.

He conceded that some foetuses may have been aborted beyond Pennsylvania’s 24-week limit. Evidence showed that two pregnancies were estimated to have been ended at 26 weeks and 28 weeks.

Dr Gosnell’s defence attorney attempted to paint a picture of a doctor who helped poor, young women in an urban population, someone who “never turned away a woman because she had no money”.

On occasions, the doctor would take an IOU from a patient or in one case had an offer to have his fence painted in lieu of payment.

McMahon urged jurors to disregard the treatment table and chair that prosecutors brought into court for the trial, saying that they were dusty and worn as they had been stored for some time and that prosecutors chose not to bring new equipment from the clinic into the courtroom.

Closing the prosecution’s case, assistant district attorney Edward Cameron said the case “isn’t about abortion because abortion is legal as long as it is clean”.

He denied that this was a case about a tsunami or a rush to judgment but “about the fact that people should have basic standards. This was a case about “back-alley coat-hanger abortions,” he said.

The jury is expected to begin its deliberations today.