Summary
Monday, the Indiana State Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in the feticide and child neglect conviction of Indiana resident, Purvi Patel.
Patel, the first woman to be convicted for having an illegal abortion, is facing 20 years in prison. She was not present in the courtroom on Monday afternoon as a three-judge panel listened to arguments on whether or not to overturn her convictions.
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Patel’s attorney, Lawrence Marshall, co-founder of the Center on Wrongful Convictions and a professor at Stanford University, argued that the state’s case against Purvi Patel relies on an unfair and incorrect conflation of the charges against her. Step by step he walked the judges through his argument, laying out the inconsistencies.
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And if they believe she neglected a child, they cannot count actions she took (namely taking abortifacient drugs) while pregnant to make the case for the neglect charge, they can only consider the actions she took after birth. So, Marshall argued, the state is trying to have it both ways, by using these two mutually exclusive charges to prop each other up. This, he argued, makes for an insufficient argument in each charge, and unjust and unfair conviction of Patel.
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