Bulletin: Purvi Patel; Indiana; Major Development; (Good news - but not nearly good enough. HL); The Guardian reports that Purvi Patel has had her 20-year sentence for inducing her own abortion reduced..."Indiana appeals court ruling means prison sentence for conviction, the first of its kind in the US, will be shortened by at least a decade."..."The ruling was not a uniform victory for Patel. The court held that the state had mounted sufficient evidence to show Patel knew the infant was born alive. Patel’s appeals team had challenged the integrity of the forensic test, the controversial “lung float test”, that prosecutors used to argue the infant was not stillborn. But the court agreed with Patel that the state did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the infant could have survived. It reduced her child neglect conviction from a class A felony to a class D. “The Indiana court of appeals … ultimately failed Purvi Patel,” Yamani Hernandez, the director of the National Network of Abortion Funds, said Friday. “People of color are bearing the brunt of unscientific laws and misplaced moral outrage against abortion, which is blurring into the territory of miscarriage, putting any pregnant person at risk of prosecution and incarceration. It needs to stop, and the decision didn’t go far enough to restore full justice for Purvi Patel.”

"An Indiana appeals court on Friday threw out the most serious conviction of Purvi Patel, the first US woman to be sent to prison for inducing her own abortion, and reduced the severity of the other charge of which she was convicted, with a rebuke for the prosecutors who sought furiously to convict her of fetal homicide. The ruling will cut at least a decade off Patel’s prison sentence, and probably more. Patel, whose name has become a touchstone in the nation’s abortion debate, has served a little over a year of her 20-year prison sentence for child neglect and feticide. Both convictions stemmed from her 2013 self-abortion attempt, which ended in a miscarriage. In a 42-page ruling, by Judge Terry A Crone, the court reduced the child neglect charge by an order of magnitude. And it reproached prosecutors for charging Patel under the state’s 2009 feticide law, saying there was no evidence that lawmakers intended the law to punish pregnant women. Indiana passed the measure in 2009 after a pregnant woman was shot and lost the twins she was carrying. “Given that the legislature decriminalized abortion with respect to pregnant women only two years before it enacted the feticide statute, we conclude that the legislature never intended the feticide statute to apply to pregnant women,” the decision declared. “Therefore, we vacate Patel’s feticide conviction.” Patel’s conviction, in 2015, made her a national symbol in the debate swirling around abortion. Last week, when Donald Trump selected the Indiana governor, Mike Pence, as his partner on the Republican presidential ticket, many abortion rights groups invoked Patel’s name as a cautionary tale. Trump has said women who have illegal abortions ought to face “some form of punishment”. And activists had prevailed upon Pence to clarify the 2009 law used to convict her, without success. The ruling was not a uniform victory for Patel. The court held that the state had mounted sufficient evidence to show Patel knew the infant was born alive. Patel’s appeals team had challenged the integrity of the forensic test, the controversial “lung float test”, that prosecutors used to argue the infant was not stillborn. But the court agreed with Patel that the state did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the infant could have survived. It reduced her child neglect conviction from a class A felony to a class D. “The Indiana court of appeals … ultimately failed Purvi Patel,” Yamani Hernandez, the director of the National Network of Abortion Funds, said Friday. “People of color are bearing the brunt of unscientific laws and misplaced moral outrage against abortion, which is blurring into the territory of miscarriage, putting any pregnant person at risk of prosecution and incarceration. It needs to stop, and the decision didn’t go far enough to restore full justice for Purvi Patel.”.........The ruling comes as a growing number of women in the US face prosecution for their behavior or actions during pregnancy. Groups such as the National Advocates for Pregnant Women have counted hundreds of cases in which prosecutors charged women with criminal offenses for having “suspicious miscarriages”, using banned substances during their pregnancies, or trying to induce their own abortions. Often, the women are charged under laws that were intended to increase the penalties for harming a pregnant woman, such as in an assault or a car accident. A few women, like Patel, have been prosecuted under such laws for trying to induce their own abortion – even in cases where it would be legal for them to receive an abortion in a clinic. Under an expansive interpretation of fetal homicide and other laws, Jill Adams, a Berkeley Law researcher who oversees the Self-Induced Abortion Legal Team, has estimated that a woman who tries to end her own pregnancy may be violating any one of 40 different statutes."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/22/purvi-patel-abortion-sentence-reduced