INDIANAPOLIS (Diya TV) — The Indiana Court of Appeals has overturned the feticide conviction of Indian American Purvi Patel, who was previously found guilty of killing the premature infant she delivered after ingesting abortion-inducing drugs.
Patel was convicted of neglect and feticide last year. The court upheld a lower-level felony neglect of a dependent conviction in Friday’s ruling, and ordered Patel resentenced on the new conviction.
Patel was 35 when she delivered the infant at her home in Granger in 2013.
Patel’s attorneys argued the feticide laws prosecutors used don’t apply to Patel’s alleged actions. State lawyers argued that Patel’s infant was just beyond the threshold of viability and took at least one breath before dying.
Opponents of Patel’s conviction have argued that the charge of feticide was never created for the use of criminal prosecution against pregnant women, but instead was meant to serve as an instrument to target providers of illegal abortions. Patel became the first Indiana woman to be convicted of feticide in a case like this in state history.
In a previous hearing, Patel’s lawyer, Lawrence Marshall berated the state for its use of the feticide statute, and said Indiana’s laws do not criminalize this type of abortion and should have never played a role in his client’s case. Additionally, he scrutinized the state’s case on the charge of neglect, which he said was not proven during Patel’s trial. The state never asked its expert witness whether Patel’s child would have made any noise or shown any visible signs of life that would signal to Patel that the baby was not stillborn, he said.
Prosecutors also never presented any evidence that the child, who was born several weeks premature, would have benefited from medical care received at the hospital, Marshall said.
Patel, who was 32 at the time, used the drugs because she feared her family would discover she had been impregnated by a married man, according to court documents. Patel lived with her parents and grandparents in Granger, a city just northeast of South Bend along the Michigan border.
