Woman Accused of Murder for Aborting Child to Sue Prosecutors and Sheriff in Texas
Houston, TX- Lizelle Gonzalez, 26, will be allowed to sue prosecutors and sheriffs in a case seeking $1 million in damages for the two nights she spent in a Texas jail following her false accusation of murder for a self-induced abortion in 2022.
As Law&Crime previously reported, Gonzalez first filed the claim in March, naming Gocha Allen Ramirez, the Starr County district attorney, Alexandria Barrera, the assistant DA, and the county itself. Gonzalez claimed that she was subjected to public humiliation and that her civil rights had been violated as a result of their “illegal and unconstitutional actions” against her, particularly the filing of a false lawsuit against her that was later dropped.
According to the Associated Press, during a hearing in a Texas courthouse, prosecutors attempted to have the case dismissed; however, U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton, a previous president Donald Trump appointee, refused to comply.
Ramirez was punished for filing the charges against Gonzalez and was found to have broken the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct, as Law&Crime extensively covered. Ramirez received a one-year probated suspension for permitting Barrera, a person working directly under his direction, to use Texas law to “pursue criminal homicide charges against an individual for acts clearly not criminal.”
There are very few exceptions to Texas’s abortion ban, but women who seek an abortion are shielded from prosecution by state law.
According to the Associated Press, one of the defendants’ attorneys described Gonzalez’s situation as “at worst a negligence case” and mentioned that the Starr County DA had already conceded that she had been wrongly charged. Ramirez consented to have his license suspended for a year and pay a fine of $1,250 as part of a settlement with the State Bar of Texas.
Gonzalez claims that the Texas hospital Starr County Memorial Hospital, where she underwent treatment and eventually had a caesarian section to deliver a stillborn child, violated her right to privacy by disclosing the abortion to the police months after she used the medication misoprostol to self-induce an abortion when she was 19 weeks pregnant.
Tipton allegedly questioned Gonzalez’s counsel about whether they thought they could demonstrate that the defendants knew there were state exemptions for abortion-related murder charges, even though he would have allowed her lawsuit to proceed.
According to the Austin American-Statesmen, Gonzalez’s attorney, David Donatti, stated that their goal was to demonstrate that the defendants’ claimed “negligence” was insufficient to account for their lack of supervision.
Donatti, an attorney with the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, stated on Wednesday that “it is the role and function of prosecutors to be aware of the elements of the statutes that they are charging.”
Gonzales claims in the lawsuit that she was intentionally prosecuted and that the prosecutors who brought the charges against her acted “recklessly and callously.”
She is also suing the Rio Grande Police Department and the Starr County Sheriff’s Department for neglecting to conduct a thorough investigation into the indictment against her.
Source: Law and Crime
