INDIANAPOLIS (AP) – An Indiana woman whose feticide conviction for a self-induced abortion was overturned in July walked out of prison Thursday, a day after a judge resentenced her to less time than she had already served and ordered her immediate release.
Purvi Patel, 35, was with relatives when she left the Indiana Women’s Prison in Indianapolis about 10 a.m., said Indiana Department of Correction spokesman Doug Garrison.
Her attorney, Lawrence Marshall, said Patel is “very, very joyful that this day has come,” but that she now needs privacy so that she can focus on rebuilding her life.
“For right now, she needs to recover from what is obviously a traumatic several years,” said Marshall, a Stanford University law professor. “She has to take her life and try to make something meaningful out of all the wreckage that got her here.”
Patel was convicted in 2015 of killing her premature infant by taking abortion-inducing drugs and sentenced to 20 years in prison. She appealed her feticide and child neglect convictions and the Indiana Court of Appeals vacated both convictions in July, finding that the state’s feticide law wasn’t meant to be used to prosecute women for their own abortions.