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Kline subpoenaed patient records; he said they showed that Tiller had justified the abortions by diagnosing women with anxiety or a single episode of depression. Because of a jurisdictional dispute, the charges were dropped just days before Kline left office. He had lost his bid for reelection in large part because his opponent, Paul Morrison, painted him as an antiabortion extremist.
When Morrison took office, he declined to refile the charges against Tiller.
But Morrison did launch his own investigation using the limited number of patient medical files available to him. That resulted in the 19 misdemeanor counts pending in District Court. The charges allege that Tiller did not get the required second opinion from an independent doctor on some late-term cases, but rather relied on a physician with financial ties to his practice.
Tiller attorney Dan Monnat said "there was nothing illegal in the relationship" between the two physicians.
Monnat has filed a brief contesting the requirement for a second opinion. The U.S. Supreme Court and federal appeals courts have repeatedly struck down such requirements as infringing on a physician's right to practice medicine.
The courts have also held that laws banning abortion must make exceptions to protect the woman's health, including her mental health.
Determined to keep the pressure on Tiller, antiabortion activists have spent the last year staging prayer vigils and protest rallies - at least one of them promoted nationally by Fox News anchor Bill O'Reilly, who has referred to the doctor on air as "Tiller the baby killer."
About 10 days before one of the bigger rallies, in July, unknown vandals drilled holes through the roof of Tiller's one-story clinic and threaded a hose into the building, apparently trying to flood it. The resulting damage - and lingering mold - forced Tiller to close his practice for more than a month.
But now he is seeing patients again, and his allies are betting that he'll weather the storm, just as he has in the past.
His clinic was bombed in 1986 and blockaded for six weeks in 1991. In 1993, an antiabortion activist shot Tiller through both arms; he was back at work the next day.
In 2005, antiabortion activists circulated petitions to force a grand jury investigation into the treatment of a 19-year-old mentally disabled patient who died of complications from an early-third-trimester abortion at Tiller's clinic. The grand jury found no grounds for criminal indictment.
In a rare interview two years ago, Tiller said he tried to block out the protests and the politics so he could focus on his patients.
"If I engage, then I wear out, and I have less ... stamina for what goes on inside the clinic," he said. "If I give away my emotional serenity, they win."
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