Purvi Patel: Indiana; Convicted of feticide and sentenced to 20 years in prison after being accused of illegally inducing her own abortion and having a baby whom she allowed to die. Emily Bazelon writes in the New York Times Magazine that, "this could be just the beginning." (Must, Must Read. HL);

COMMENTARY: "Purvi Patel could  be just  the beginning," by Emily Bazelon,  published by The New York Times on April 1, 2015. (Emily Bazelon is a staff writer for the magazine and the Truman Capote Fellow at Yale Law School.)


PHOTO CAPTION:  "Purvi Patel, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for feticide and neglect of a dependent on Monday, at the St. Joseph County Courthouse in South Bend, Ind."

GIST: "The prosecution of Purvi Patel began in sorrow and ended in more sadness this week. Patel, a 33-year-old woman who lives in Indiana, was accused of feticide — specifically, illegally inducing her own abortion — and accused of having a baby whom she allowed to die. The facts supporting each count are murky, but a jury convicted Patel in February, and on Monday she was sentenced to 20 years in prison. It’s tempting to simply look away from Patel’s case on the grounds that it is an outlier, however tragic. But it demonstrates how unsparing the criminal-justice system can be to women whose pregnancies end in (or otherwise involve) suspicious circumstances. If one lesson of the case is about the legal risk of inducing your own late-term abortion, another is about the peril of trying to get medical help when you are bleeding and in pain......... If this case were only about a woman who clearly gave birth to a live baby and then killed her child, it would be clear cut. There is a line between pregnancy and birth, and once it is crossed, the state has just as much at stake in protecting the life of a newborn as it does in protecting the life of anyone else. But the evidence that Patel’s baby was born alive is sharply contested. The pathologist who testified for the defense, Shaku Teas, said the baby was stillborn. Teas told the court the fetus was at 23 or 24 weeks gestation and that its lungs weren’t developed enough to breathe. (Here’s more support for this position.) But the pathologist for the prosecution, Joseph Prahlow, testified that the fetus was further along than that — at 25 to 30 weeks gestation, which is past the point of viability — and was born alive. News reports from the trial emphasized Prahlow’s use of a “lung float test” in making his determination. The idea behind the test — which dates from the 17th century — is that if the lungs float in water, the baby took at least one breath. If they sink, then the fetus died before leaving the womb. If that sounds like the old test for witchcraft — if an accused witch floated, she was judged guilty; if she sank, she was innocent — it’s also about as old and nearly as discredited. “The lung float test was disproven over 100 years ago as an indicator for live birth,” Gregory J. Davis, assistant state medical examiner for Kentucky and a professor of pathology and lab medicine at the University of Kentucky, told me. “It’s just not valid.” When I called Prahlow, who is a professor of pathology and lab medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine, South Bend, and a former president of the National Association of Medical Examiners, he conceded that “the lung float test, in and of itself, is unreliable.” Still, Prahlow argued, the lung test could “provide corroborating evidence, in light of additional findings.” Prahlow enumerated those findings to me as he had to the Patel jury: The weight of the lungs and the other organs, the inflation of the lungs and the air sacs, the presence of blood in the lung vessels and the “relative maturity” of the lungs. Put these findings together, along with a lack of blood in the baby’s body, and “I can’t come up with any other explanation other than that this baby was born alive,” Prahlow said. But Davis was unconvinced. He said that while he knows and respects Prahlow, his conclusion was “dead wrong.” Prahlow’s list of findings are still “totally nonspecific” as to whether Patel’s baby died in utero or after being born, Davis said. “Or even if we agree hypothetically that the baby took a breath, that doesn’t mean Ms. Patel did anything wrong. What if she was scared and bleeding herself, and she didn’t clamp the cord in time, because she didn’t know how, and the baby died?” To Davis, the forensics in this case can’t determine whether Patel was culpable any more than looking at a body that fell from a high building can determine whether the fall was a suicide, an accident or a homicide. “Sometimes the only answer you can give as a scientist is ‘I don’t know,’” he said. Whatever happened to Patel and her baby at the point of delivery, it’s hard to imagine that either the prosecution or the judge at sentencing would have come down as hard on her if they weren’t sure she’d tried to induce her own illegal abortion. And this is where Patel’s case moves from a fight over birth to a fight over pregnancy. This is the first case I can find in which a state-level feticide law has been successfully used to punish a woman for trying to have an abortion.........Patel’s case stands out, for the draconian length of the sentence she received, and for the disturbing image of a baby left in a Dumpster. But it is also part of a pattern. “This case shows how easy it is to sweep up women who’ve had miscarriages and stillbirths into a criminal justice framework,” Paltrow told me. For her, the key question is how to ensure that fewer women become as desperate as Patel must have been about her pregnancy. “Do you think these cases will be less rare if you terrify people and make them criminals?” she said."

The entire commentary can be found at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/magazine/purvi-patel-could-be-just-the-beginning.html

Petition for full and immediate  pardon to President Obama: "This petition is to pardon Indiana resident Purvi Patel on the charges of feticide and neglect of a dependent related to a miscarriage that occurred shortly after her 20th week of pregnancy. Her trial included such unscientific "evidence" as a lung-float test and her affect while hospitalized, as well as a focus on her ambivalence toward her pregnancy and her alleged purchase of medication to end her pregnancy, even though a blood test showed an absence of such medication. A conviction due to a miscarriage sets a very serious and dangerous precedent."

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/issue-full-and-immediate-pardon-indiana-resident-purvi-patel

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: 

Dear Reader. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog. We are following this case.
 
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Harold Levy; Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog;