Wrongfully Imprisoned Woman Granted Permission to Sue Prosecutors and Sheriffs for $1M in Abortion Case
Lizelle Gonzalez, 26, will be able to sue prosecutors and sheriffs for $1 million in damages for the two nights she spent in jail in Texas after being wrongly charged with murder for an abortion she had herself in 2022.
Law&Crime reported that Gonzalez first claimed in March. He named Gocha Allen Ramirez as the Starr County district attorney, Alexandria Barrera as the assistant district attorney, and Starr County itself. Gonzalez said they violated her civil rights and made her feel bad by charging her in a fake case and then dropping it a few days later. They did things that were “illegal and unconstitutional.”
At a meeting in a Texas courtroom, the prosecutors tried to get the case thrown out, but U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, would not do what they asked.
Law & Crime wrote a long article about how Ramirez was punished for charging Gonzalez and was found to have broken the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct. For letting Barrera, who worked for Ramirez, “pursue criminal homicide charges against a person for acts clearly not criminal,” according to Texas law, Ramirez was suspended for one year.
In Texas, abortions are mostly illegal, but women who want to have one are not charged with a crime because of a state rule.
According to the Associated Press, a lawyer for the defendants said that Gonzalez’s case was “at worst a negligence case” and that the Starr County DA had earlier admitted to charging her wrongly. As part of a deal with the State Bar of Texas, Ramirez paid a $1,250 fine and accepted that his license would be suspended for a year.
Gonzalez used the drug misoprostol to have an abortion on her own when she was 19 weeks pregnant. She now says that Starr County Memorial Hospital in Texas, where she was treated and later had a C-section to deliver a stillborn baby, violated her right to privacy by telling the police about the abortion months later.
Even though he agreed to let her case go forward, Tipton is said to have asked Gonzalez’s lawyers if they were sure they could show that the defendants knew there were exceptions in the state for murder charges related to abortion.
According to the Austin American-Statesmen, Gonzalez’s lawyer, David Donatti, said that they planned to show that the suspects’ so-called “negligence” did not explain why they did not keep an eye on things.
Donatti, a lawyer with the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said Wednesday, “It is the job and duty of prosecutors to know the parts of the laws they are charging.”
Gonzales says in her claim that the prosecutors who charged her did so “recklessly and callously” and were trying to hurt her.
She is also suing the Rio Grande Police Department and the Starr County Sheriff’s Department for not doing enough to look into the charges against her.