Will Patel win appeal to overturn her 20-year sentence?
AB Wire
In one of the most important cases of the 21st century in the US, closely watched by women’s groups, the Indian American woman Purvi Patel, from Indiana, who was sentenced to 20 years for a self-induced abortion – the first one in the country to be sentenced – appealed on Monday to have the charges against her overturned. The proceedings began with the judge on the Indiana Court of Appeals repeatedly asking the state if they had any evidence to suggest that Patel knew that the child she delivered was alive at birth.
Judge Nancy Vaidik noted during the hearing on Patel’s bid to have the charges thrown out that no evidence was presented at trial that the 35-year-old northern Indiana woman knew she had delivered a live child, reported the Associated Press. Such evidence would help support her conviction on a charge of neglect of a dependent resulting in death.
“You can’t endanger a dead baby, can you?” Vaidik asked deputy attorney general Ellen Meilaender, who presented the state’s arguments.
One of Patel’s attorneys, Stanford University law professor Lawrence C. Marshall, told the court that the charges aren’t supported by the evidence in the 2013 death of her premature child after Patel ingested abortion-inducing drugs.
Patel was sentenced last year to 20 years in prison on the neglect charge and six years in prison on the feticide charge, with the terms to be served concurrently.
Patel’s appeal contends prosecutors failed to prove she knew she had delivered a live baby or that she could have done anything to save his life. It argues that summoning medical help would have been “futile,” citing a forensic pathologist’s testimony that the infant likely would have died within about a minute.
Her appeal also says that Indiana’s feticide law was “passed to protect pregnant women from violence” that could harm their developing fetus, not to prosecute women for their own abortions. The state argues that the law “is not limited to third-party actors” and can apply to pregnant women, reported AP.
Patel, of Granger, was arrested in July 2013 after she sought treatment at a local hospital for profuse bleeding after delivering a 1½-pound infant boy and putting his body in a trash bin behind her family’s restaurant. Court records show Patel purchased abortion-inducing drugs online through a pharmacy in Hong Kong, took those drugs and delivered a premature baby in her home bathroom.
Patel lived with her parents and grandparents, and she feared her family would discover she had been impregnated by a married man, according to court documents.
Two dozen women’s advocacy groups, as well as Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union, all have filed friend-of-the-court briefs siding with Patel.
The Guardian reported the case made Patel a national symbol in the debate swirling around access to abortion. Women’s rights advocates argued that limitations on abortion, which are numerous in Indiana, had prevented Patel from terminating her pregnancy with the supervision of a doctor, and that her trial was a case of overzealous prosecutors criminalizing a miscarriage.
Prosecutors portrayed Patel as cold-blooded and calculating. They charged her – paradoxically, Patel’s legal team says – with both feticide, or the killing of her fetus while it was still in the womb, and child neglect, a charge that relies on the child being born alive. The state never wavered from its contention that Patel gave birth to a live infant.
Patel’s attorneys also challenge the integrity of the “lung float testâ€, the forensic test used by the prosecution to argue that Patel’s infant was not stillborn when she delivered but alive. The test is the focus of much controversy, with several cases and studies showing that it can easily produce false results, reported the Guardian.