Lizelle Gonzalez listens as a statement is read aloud by her lawyer Cecilia Garza during a press conference held in Garza’s office on April 2, 2024, in Edinburg, Texas (Joel Martinez/The Monitor via AP).
For the two nights she spent in a Texas jail after being wrongfully charged with murder for a self-induced abortion in 2022, Lizelle Gonzalez, 26, will be permitted to sue prosecutors and sheriffs in a lawsuit seeking $1 million in damages.
Gonzalez originally brought the claim in March, as Law&Crime reported, and named Starr County District Attorney Gocha Allen Ramirez, assistant DA Alexandria Barrera, and Starr County itself. For their “illegal and unconstitutional actions” against her, specifically, charging her in a bogus case only to dismiss it days later, Gonzalez said that she suffered humiliation and the violation of her civil rights.
Prosecutors tried to have the case thrown out but during a hearing in a Texas courtroom, according to the Associated Press, U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, would not oblige them.
As Law&Crime reported at length, Ramirez was disciplined for bringing the charges against Gonzalez and was found in violation of the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct. Ramirez was given a probated suspension for one year for allowing Barrera, someone under his direct supervision, to “pursue criminal homicide charges against an individual for acts clearly not criminal” under Texas law.
In Texas, abortions are prohibited with few exceptions but state law exempts women who are seeking an abortion from criminal charges.
The Associated Press reported that an attorney representing the defendants called Gonzalez’s predicament “at worst a negligence case” and acknowledged that the Starr County DA had previously admitted to mistakenly charging her. After reaching a settlement with the State Bar of Texas, Ramirez paid a fine of $1,250 and agreed to have his license in probated suspension for a year.
Gonzalez self-induced an abortion when she was 19 weeks pregnant by taking the drug misoprostol and argues that the hospital in Texas where she was treated — Starr County Memorial Hospital — and later received a caesarian section to deliver a stillborn child violated her right to privacy by reporting the abortion to authorities months later.
Though he would let her lawsuit advance, Tipton still reportedly pressed Gonzalez’s attorneys about whether they believed they could prove that the defendants knew there were exemptions in the state for abortion-related murder charges.
An attorney representing Gonzalez, David Donatti, according to the Austin American-Statesmen, said they intended to prove that the so-called “negligence” invoked by the defendants still did not explain their lack of oversight.
“It is the role and function of prosecutors to be aware of the elements of the statutes that they are charging,” Donatti, an attorney with the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said Wednesday.
In the lawsuit, Gonzales alleges that the prosecutors who charged her did so “recklessly and callously” and maliciously prosecuted her.
She is also suing the Starr County Sheriff’s Department and Rio Grande Police Department for failing to properly investigate the indictment against her.
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