A South Texas woman who was arrested on murder charges in 2022 after using medication to terminate her pregnancy has alleged new details about her case against a local sheriff and prosecutors, claiming they violated her constitutional rights.
Her Aug. 12 court filing comes as the debate over medicated abortion is heating up in Texas, with Attorney General Ken Paxton announcing a new effort to prevent the abortion pill from being mailed into Texas.
“These abortion drug organizations and radical activists are not above the law, and I have ordered the immediate end of this unlawful conduct,” Paxton said Wednesday.
The case of Lizelle Gonzalez was among the first to expose the complexities of criminalizing the use of medication to end a pregnancy. Starr County, located on the southern Texas border, launched an investigation into Gonzalez after hospital staff reported to law enforcement that she had taken medication to induce an abortion when she was 19 weeks pregnant. Three months later, she was indicted and arrested. Gonzalez spent three days in jail before her $500,000 bond was posted, and the charges were ultimately dropped.
While Texas has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, it’s not a crime for a woman to obtain or seek abortion care for herself. The state’s restrictions on abortion target physicians and those who aid a woman in obtaining or seeking an abortion, whether it’s surgical or induced by use of abortion drugs like mifepristone and misoprostol.
According to new filings in the lawsuit made last week, District Attorney Gocha Ramirez dropped the charges against Gonzalez after public outcry over Gonzalez’s arrest. Included in an exhibit in the lawsuit was a text Ramirez wrote to his son, in which he admitted he’d made a mistake and even called Gonzalez to apologize, stating he “didn’t know what happened.”
In the most detailed account to date of the events surrounding Gonzalez’s arrest, her attorneys laid out in the 70-page lawsuit the events that they say led the Starr County district attorney, the assistant D.A. and the sheriff to pursue a case against her, even though records suggest prosecutors knew her actions did not violate state law.
“They should have known from the very beginning that the conduct that they were investigating was not going to ever equal probable cause for homicide,” said Lauren Johnson, director of the Abortion Criminal Defense Initiative at the American Civil Liberties Union. “The penal code is very clear that a pregnant person cannot be charged with — cannot be guilty of a crime, of a homicide, for ending a pregnancy themselves.”
According to the original complaint filed in March 2024, Gonzalez says she went to an emergency room in January 2022 after taking misoprostol, an abortion-inducing medication.
Less than an hour after she was discharged, she returned to the hospital with complaints of abdominal pain and vaginal bleeding. After an exam detected no fetal cardiac activity, doctors performed a cesarean section to deliver a stillborn fetus.
After the procedure, a nurse at the hospital called 911 and reported the procedure to local police, who then contacted the Starr County Sheriff’s Office. The nurse later said the hospital’s administrators directed her to report the incident “because, she said, abortions could now be considered murder due to a ‘change in the law,'” according to the complaint.
“It is not an overstatement to say that Lizelle’s life was entirely upended by what happened to her,” said Johnson, who is representing Gonzalez in the lawsuit. “She wanted to live her life and didn’t want to be criminalized and have her mugshot in her local community. And have something that should have been a very personal decision be something that was made public.”
In July, the Southern District Court of Texas denied Starr County officials’ attempts to have the lawsuit dismissed after the prosecutors and sheriff raised claims of absolute and qualified immunity, respectively. The immunity doctrine has been developed by the courts to restrict legal liability of government officials, such as law enforcement, judges and prosecutors. Absolute immunity applies a complete shield from legal action regardless of the legality or constitutionality of the official’s actions. Qualified immunity however can not shield a government actor, like law enforcement, if they violate “clearly established” statutory or constitutional rights.
However, the court filings allege that all three county officials named in the suit — Ramirez, first assistant prosecutor Alexandria Barrera and Sheriff Rene Fuentes — violated “clearly established” constitutional rights when they pursued a murder charge and arrest for an action the law clearly states is not a crime. And they allege that the prosecutors acted outside of their prosecutorial capacity by directing the investigation and providing legal advice to drive the indictment — which Gonzalez argues would exempt them from any immunity.
The A.C.L.U. says the hundreds of pages of evidence it has gathered contradict the claim by county officials that they didn’t know that it was not lawful to pursue a murder charge against Gonzalez. In a sworn deposition, an investigator with the sheriff’s office testified that she wasn’t ready to charge Gonzalez with murder but was instructed to do so by Barrera.
“No practices have been put in place or conduct changed to prevent something like this from happening or being done differently in the future,” says Johnson. “I think that part has been especially alarming and really does highlight the need for ways to shine a light on this conduct and also really force elected officials to follow the law when they’re using the immense power that they have.”
The Starr County District Attorney’s office has not yet responded to a request for comment.
This story was reported by CBS News and the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Source link