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Abortion Doctor Is Found Guilty of 3 Counts of Murder Philadelphia Abortion Doctor Guilty of Murder in Late-Term Procedures
(about 4 hours later)
PHILADELPHIA — Dr. Kermit Gosnell, a West Philadelphia doctor known for performing late-term abortions, was found guilty on Monday on three of four counts of first-degree murder. PHILADELPHIA — A doctor who was responsible for cutting the spines of babies after botched abortions was convicted Monday of three counts of first-degree murder in a case that became a sharp rallying cry for anti-abortion activists.
The verdict came after a five-week trial in which the prosecution and the defense battled over whether the fetuses Dr. Gosnell was charged with killing were alive when they were removed from their mothers. The doctor, Kermit Gosnell, 72, operated a clinic in West Philadelphia catering to poor women that prosecutors called a “house of horrors.”
Prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty when the trial moves into the sentencing phase on May 21. The case turned on whether the late-term pregnancies Dr. Gosnell terminated resulted in live births. His lawyer, Jack McMahon, argued that because Dr. Gosnell injected a drug in utero to stop the heart, the deliveries were stillbirths, and movements that witnesses testified to observing — a jerked arm, a cry, swimming motions — were mere spasms.
Dr. Gosnell, 72, wearing a dark suit, showed no emotion as the jury foreman read the verdicts on the 10th day of deliberations. Before the foreman spoke, Dr. Gosnell smiled at his lawyer, Jack J. McMahon, and shook his hand. But after deliberating 10 days, the jury found Dr. Gosnell guilty in the deaths of victims known as Baby A, Baby C and Baby D. He was found not guilty of murdering Baby E.
Security in the courtroom was very tight, with 10 additional sheriff’s deputies in the room to keep order. Prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty when the trial moves into the sentencing phase next Tuesday.
The jury of eight women and four men acquitted Dr. Gosnell of one first-degree murder charge involving an aborted fetus. He was also acquitted of third-degree murder in the death of a 41-year-old patient but was found guilty of a lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter in that case. While abortion rights groups argued that Dr. Gosnell operated far outside the legalities and norms of women’s health care, abortion opponents seized on the case to raise questions about the ethics of late-term abortions. Put simply, they asked why a procedure done to a living baby outside the womb is murder, but destroying a fetus of similar gestation before delivery can be legal.
The gruesome nature of the crimes that Dr. Gosnell was accused of and the squalid conditions in his clinic had fueled arguments on both sides of the abortion debate. Anti-abortion campaigners used the case to reinforce their argument that the practice is immoral, while abortion rights advocates warned that it underlined the need to ensure the availability of properly regulated abortions. “What we need to learn from the Gosnell case is that late-term abortion is infanticide,” the Daily Beast columnist Kirsten Powers wrote last week, after starting an online furor earlier with a column suggesting that the news media had ignored the case for ideological reasons.
Some activists accused the national news media of providing scant coverage of the trial to help protect the case for abortion rights. The critics included the Roman Catholic archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles J. Chaput. The 29 reporters present in the courtroom for the verdict, many of them from national media organizations, were warned by a court official that no electronic communication would be allowed while the verdict was being read. Abortion rights supporters said it was opponents who politicized the trial. What abortion opponents really sought from the trial, they said, was an acceleration of restrictions at the state level to effectively end legal abortion.
Prosecutors had argued that Dr. Gosnell murdered seven late-term infants who would have survived if he or his assistants had not given them a drug designed to cause “fetal demise” and then plunged scissors into their necks to ensure that they were dead. But the prosecution suffered a setback last month when Judge Jeffrey P. Minehart threw out three of the seven first-degree murder charges without giving a reason. “Justice was served to Kermit Gosnell today and he will pay the price for the atrocities he committed,” Ilyse Hogue, president of Naral Pro-Choice America, said in a statement. “Anti-choice politicians, and their unrelenting efforts to deny women access to safe and legal abortion care, will only drive more women to back-alley butchers like Kermit Gosnell.”
That left Dr. Gosnell facing four charges of first-degree murder, as well as one charge of third-degree murder in connection with the death of the patient. In recent weeks, the case was cited in Congress to support restricting abortions past 20 weeks of pregnancy, and it was invoked by an anti-abortion political action committee in radio ads to attack the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe.
In defense arguments, Mr. McMahon argued that there was no evidence that any of the fetuses were born alive and that his client was therefore not guilty on any of the murder counts. He also told jurors that the death of the patient, a refugee from Bhutan, was due to existing medical problems and not to an overdose of an anesthetic administered by Dr. Gosnell’s unlicensed assistants, as prosecutors had said. Although the trial has not brought new issues or tactics to America’s long-running abortion wars, it provided an emotional jolt through five weeks of graphic testimony and an earlier grand jury report.
After the verdict, Mr. McMahon told reporters outside the courthouse, “The jury has spoken and we respect that verdict. The jury worked very, very, very hard and they should be commended.” “This is a visual argument that no one would ever want to have,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, which works to elect women opposed to abortion. “But if we’re going to have it, let’s go ahead and have it. What are the limits? What are we as a society willing to forbear?”
Mr. McMahon declined to say whether he would appeal or how he intends to keep his client off death row. He signaled that defending Dr. Gosnell had been an uphill battle, saying, “There is a little bit of feeling on the defense part of what salmon must feel like swimming upstream.” She and others predicted greater support for laws banning abortions past 20 weeks, which have been adopted in several states in recent years, on the disputed theory that fetuses of that age feel pain. Dr. Gosnell was found guilty of 24 counts of performing an abortion beyond 24 weeks, the limit in Pennsylvania.
Neither the prosecutors nor the 12 jurors were available for comment after the verdict because a gag order issued by Judge Minehart remains in place until Dr. Gosnell is sentenced. Opponents of the restrictions argue that later abortions are very rare: fewer than 1.3 percent are past 20 weeks of gestation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Abortion rights activists say restrictions before fetal viability, generally 24 weeks, violate the constitutional protections of Roe v. Wade.
Clinic workers who appeared as witnesses for the prosecution said some of the fetuses appeared to move or make noises. One, known as Baby D, was delivered into a toilet and appeared to make swimming motions before one of Dr. Gosnell’s assistants cut its neck, according to a worker cited during closing arguments by Edward Cameron, an assistant district attorney. Nonetheless, “the imagery” of later abortion “is very powerful,” said Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager for the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion access. “In 2010 Nebraska banned abortion at 20 weeks post-fertilization,” she said. “That bill was seen as the type of bill that was going to catch fire across the country. It did.”
Mr. Cameron and another assistant district attorney, Joanne Pescatore, also told the jury that Dr. Gosnell kept the severed feet of aborted fetuses in dozens of jars around his clinic, the Women’s Medical Society in West Philadelphia. Dr. Gosnell was also convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of a 41-year-old patient, Karnamaya Mongar, who died of an overdose of sedatives. Among lesser charges, he was found guilty of 211 counts of not waiting 24 hours after consulting with a patient before performing an abortion.
According to a January 2011 grand jury report, Dr. Gosnell’s patients were covered with bloodstained blankets, treated with unsterilized instruments and surrounded by cats that were allowed to defecate in the building. Activists on both sides debated whether the deplorable conditions at Dr. Gosnell’s clinic — including broken equipment, bloodstained recovery chairs and an untrained staff giving anesthesia and other drugs — could be found at other clinics.
To bolster their argument that Dr. Gosnell subjected his patients to filthy and dangerous conditions, prosecutors presented the jury with a dirty procedure table and a stained ultrasound probe. Anti-abortion groups cited the case to press for more regulations of clinics. “By pulling back the secrecy that cloaks this industry that preys on women’s misery, we have a real agenda moving forward,” said Charmaine Yoest, the president of Americans United for Life, which pushes for stricter clinic rules.
Among the lesser charges he faced, Dr. Gosnell was found not guilty of 16 out of 227 counts of violating a Pennsylvania law that requires doctors to wait at least 24 hours before performing an abortion after first consulting with a patient. He was found guilty of 21 out of 24 counts of performing an abortion at 24 weeks or later in a pregnancy. But abortion rights groups attacked the regulations as a backdoor route to shut clinics by requiring costly but medically unneeded upgrades, like wider hallways and bigger closets.
“What’s going on with these laws is really about the agenda of having abortion eventually made illegal again,” said Nancy Northrup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights in Washington, which has challenged the laws in court. “And if that were to happen, unfortunately you’d have a lot more Gosnells out there.”
The scathing grand jury report in 2011 on Dr. Gosnell’s clinic, the Women’s Medical Society, on Lancaster Avenue, detailed how despite complaints and malpractice suits, no inspector had visited in 16 years. The clinic was raided only after a tip that it operated as an illegal prescription mill. A month after the report, Gov. Tom Corbett fired six employees of the Health and State departments.
In the witness box, clinic employees said live births occurred regularly, and they believed Dr. Gosnell’s explanation for snipping necks with surgical scissors — to “ensure fetal demise” — was accepted practice in late-term abortions. An abortion doctor who testified for the prosecution said such practice was unheard of.
One witness, Steven Massof, testifying under a plea agreement to avoid first-degree murder charges, instructed jurors to feel the backs of their own necks and said, “It’s like a beheading.”
Another former employee, Adrienne Moton, sobbed as she described the death of Baby A, aborted when his teenage mother was about 29 weeks pregnant. Ms. Moton was so upset she took a cellphone photograph of him, which was shown in court. She said Dr. Gosnell had joked that the baby was big enough to walk to a bus stop.
Ms. Moton, who also testified under a plea agreement, said she cut the neck of Baby D, who was delivered into a toilet while its mother, given a large dose of a drug to dilate the cervix, waited for Dr. Gosnell to arrive.
Another clinic worker said she followed Dr. Gosnell’s instructions and cut the neck of Baby C after it moved an arm. The doctor told her was an “involuntary movement.”
Dr. Gosnell was originally charged with seven counts of first-degree murder, but Judge Jeffrey P. Minehart of Common Pleas Court earlier threw out three other cases of infants said to have been born alive, known as Baby B, Baby F and Baby G.
Several weeks into the trial, which began March 18, anti-abortion activists and some conservative commentators accused the national news media of skipping it, a charge amplified across social media.
On April 15, President Obama’s spokesman was asked if he was following the trial. “The president is aware” of the case, said Jay Carney, the White House spokesman.
Even as reporters from national newspapers arrived in Courtroom 304 of the Criminal Justice Center, a blog war continued between abortion-rights supporters, who had written of Dr. Gosnell’s abuses from the time of his indictment, and conservatives, who continued to fault broadcast television for a “blackout.”
On Monday, there were 29 reporters in the courtroom and a row of television crews on the sidewalk.

Jon Hurdle reported from Philadelphia, and Trip Gabriel from New York.