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ST. JOSEPH SUPERIOR COURT · INDIANA COURT OF APPEALS, 71A01-1504-CR-166 (JULY 22, 2016)
On the night of July 13, 2013, the county's machinery came to a Granger home: Purvi Patel, thirty-two, who managed her father's restaurant, presented at the emergency room of St. Joseph Hospital in Mishawaka bleeding heavily, and told the medical staff — in the words of the County Metro Homicide Unit's own affidavit — that she had delivered a baby in her home in Granger, Indiana; that she had not seen the child breathing or moving and believed it dead; and that she had put the body in a bag and placed it in a dumpster behind the Super Target. Detectives recovered the infant from the dumpster, the Metro Homicide Unit was activated, and the forensic pathologist's examination fixed the pregnancy at at least twenty-eight weeks and concluded, in his opinion, that the child had been born alive and had taken a breath. The state charged Patel in the St. Joseph Superior Court with Class A felony neglect of a dependent — that she had knowingly failed to provide any medical care for the child immediately after its birth, resulting in its death — and with Class B felony feticide, that she had knowingly terminated her pregnancy with an intention other than to produce a live birth. A jury convicted her on both counts in February 2015, and on March 30, 2015, the trial court sentenced her to thirty years for the neglect, twenty executed and ten suspended, with a concurrent six years for the feticide.
The appeal made the case the ground's one entry in the nation's law reports. On July 22, 2016, the Indiana Court of Appeals held, first, that the feticide conviction could not stand: the legislature, the court ruled, had not intended the feticide statute to apply to illegal abortions or to be used to prosecute women for their own abortions, and the conviction was vacated outright. On the neglect count the court split the state's proof: it accepted the jury's finding that the child was born alive and that Patel, subjectively aware of that fact, had knowingly endangered the child by failing to seek medical care — but held that the state had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the child would not have died even if care had been provided. The Class A conviction was vacated, with instructions to enter judgment for Class D felony neglect of a dependent and resentence. The state chose not to carry the case to the Indiana Supreme Court; on resentencing in September 2016 the trial court imposed eighteen months, and Patel — who had by then served more time than the new sentence — was released. As the national press recorded it through the case's course, she was the first woman in the United States to be charged, convicted and sentenced under a feticide law for ending her own pregnancy; the appellate judgment that ended the prosecution is the durable artifact, and it arose, entire, from a house in Granger.
The case is printed here at the size the court record supports and no larger: the infant is unnamed in the record and unnamed here, and the proceedings — affidavit, charges, verdict, sentence, appeal, resentencing, release — are the whole of it. It remains, at this build, the only prosecution seated inside the designated place to have reached an appellate court, and the only Granger case with a national citation.
Sources: Probable-cause and supplemental affidavits of Det. Galen Pelletier, County Metro Homicide Unit, St. Joseph Superior Court, July 2013 (the Granger home; the hospital; the dumpster; Dr. Joseph Prahlow's findings as the affidavit states them). Patel v. State, 60 N.E.3d 1041 (Ind. Ct. App. July 22, 2016) (the charges and sentence as the opinion recites them; the holdings, quoted in substance). The resentencing and release: the press of record, August–September 2016 (the state's decision not to seek Supreme Court review; Judge Elizabeth C. Hurley's eighteen-month sentence; release on time served). The first-of-kind national framing: the Associated Press and national coverage of 2015–2016, as the opinion's chroniclers record it.