Court hears Indian-American woman's appeal of feticide

Indiana appeals court judges grilled an attorney for the state today over whether there was evidence an Indian-American woman found guilty of neglect and feticide in a self-induced abortion knew she had given birth to a live child.
During a hearing on Purvi Patel's bid to have her convictions thrown out, Judge L Mark Bailey asked whether evidence at trial showed the 35-year-old northern Indiana woman knew she had delivered a live, premature child that would need immediate medical care.
Deputy attorney general Ellen Meilaender, who presented the state's arguments, replied no, saying Patel claimed the "baby was dead" when she delivered it in 2013 after ingesting abortion-inducing drugs she bought online.

The state argues that Patel's infant was at least 25 weeks into gestation, just beyond the threshold of viability, and had taken at least one breath before dying.
Judge Nancy Vaidik asked Meilaender how the state can defend Patel's conviction on a charge of neglect of a dependent resulting in death if there was not conclusive evidence the child was born alive and needed medical care.
"You can't endanger a dead baby, can you?" Vaidik asked. Meilaender pointed to the presence of the baby's blood in a bag Patel placed the child in as evidence the infant's heart was beating when it entered the bag, which was found in a trash bin behind her family's restaurant.

"The fact that the baby's DNA, the baby's blood, was in the bag suggests that the baby had not died yet," Meilaender said.

Patel, of Granger, received 20 years in prison on the neglect charge last year and six years on the feticide charge, with the sentences to run at the same time.
Her appeal contends prosecutors failed to prove she knew she had delivered a live baby boy 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 from bleeding within about a minute after Patel cut the umbilical cord.

One of Patel's attorneys, Stanford University law professor Lawrence C Marshall, told the court that even if Patel would have tried to clamp the umbilical cord after cutting it, that "would have slowed things down just a bit but wouldn't have made any difference." Marshall said that explanation came from trial testimony.