Posted on 05/01/2015 7:04:11 AM PDT by Citizen Zed
As a Granger woman fights to overturn her conviction and 20-year prison sentence in a highly publicized child neglect and feticide case, she will have cost-free help from two prominent experts in criminal appeals.
Stanford University law professor Lawrence Marshall and Indiana University law professor Joel Schumm have filed to represent Purvi Patel before the Indiana Court of Appeals, and both are offering their services pro bono, or for free.
Before he began teaching at Stanford, Marshall founded the Center for Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University, while Schumm founded an appellate clinic at the IU Robert H. McKinney School of Law.
Both lawyers said the case raised many important legal questions, and Marshall added that he was troubled by how Indiana’s feticide law was applied in the case.
“There are issues here, there are errors here that were committed, that in our view justify and compel reversal,” Marshall said. “We will be hopefully showing the appellate court that errors were committed in both interpreting the law and how facts were allowed to be proven.”
Patel was convicted of child neglect and feticide after, authorities said, she illegally used drugs to try to induce her own abortion, then failed to get medical help for her infant son after he was born alive. A judge handed down a 20-year sentence in March. Police found Patel’s baby July 14, 2013, in a Dumpster behind Moe’s Southwest Grill in Mishawaka.
The case drew widespread media coverage beyond Indiana and sparked intense reactions for and against Patel. Marshall said he believed emotions interfered with the law in Patel’s case.
“What I generally gravitate toward are cases where it seems like an intense passion has interfered with dispassionate interpretation and application of the law,” he said. “It struck me that this case may be a textbook example of that phenomenon.”
Some critics said the case showed how the state’s feticide law could increasingly be used against women who miscarry or seek abortions, instead of against domestic abusers or drunken drivers whose actions cause pregnant women to lose their babies.
Others leveled scorn at some of the evidence used by prosecutors, such as the testimony of a forensic pathologist who used a controversial “float test” to prove the baby’s lungs had drawn a breath after he was born.
Schumm, who said he has worked on about 150 appeals since 2001, many of them on a pro bono basis, said he was interested in raising important legal arguments on Patel’s behalf, but was not motivated by political outrage.
“I’m not taking this case with a political agenda in mind at all,” he said. “I’m taking it with the view that she’s been convicted of a serious crime and she, like everyone else, deserves a defense of those convictions, a zealous defense.”
The St. Joseph Superior Court has 90 days to provide Patel’s lawyers with transcripts of her trial. The lawyers would then have 30 days, with a possible 30-day extension, to file a brief of their case with the Court of Appeals. At that point, the court could hear oral arguments before ruling.
Marshall is leading Patel’s team, while Schumm is serving as co-counsel.
Short on facts.
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