The doctor who saw her suspected that she had induced a late abortion and called the police. When Patel woke up after sedation, there was a police officer stationed by her bed. The anti-choice doctor left the hospital and joined the police in a search for a fetus. A one-pound fetus was indeed found, by the police, in a Dumpster. Despite hospital tests showing no traces of any abortifacent in her blood work, the state of Indiana charged her with both feticide for allegedly inducing an abortion, and child neglect for allegedly having a premature baby and then allowing the baby to die. On March 30, 2015, Patel, convicted of both crimes, was sentenced to 20 consecutive years in prison. To date, she has served one year and four months of that time.

On Friday, July 22, Judge Terry A. Crone of the Indiana Court of Appeals reduced the child neglect charge against Patel and threw out the feticide charge. In his 42-page ruling, Judge Crone chastised prosecutors for charging Patel under the state’s 2009 feticide law,

In his 42-page ruling, Judge Crone chastised prosecutors for charging Patel under the state’s 2009 feticide law, finding “that the legislature did not intend for the feticide statute to apply to illegal abortions or to be used to prosecute women for their own abortions.” The court agreed with Patel’s appeal attorneys and the doctors who made the case that the state did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the fetus could have survived had she done anything differently. A unanimous panel of the Indiana Court of Appeals overturned the feticide conviction. It also reduced her child neglect conviction from a class A felony to class D. Class D convictions carry a maximum sentence of three years.

However, it’s not all good news for Patel. The Court also held that the state’s case did offer sufficient evidence to show Patel knew the infant was born alive. This, despite the fact that Patel’s attorneys challenged the use of the controversial, and historically discredited, “lung float test” that prosecutors used to argue the infant was not stillborn.

This is Mike Pence’s Indiana. This is Donald Trump’s America. One in which women are punished for abortion, for miscarriage, and potentially for any outcome of their pregnancy that doesn’t result in a healthy baby. “Healthy,” in this case, is determined by the politicians who seek to proscribe who can have an abortion, when, and for what reasons.

Though the court’s ruling on the illegitimacy of the feticide conviction and the reduction of charge is significant, and implies that the court did not flout well-established legal principles, it does not amount to justice for Ms. Patel. When the state was unable to offer actual evidence that Ms. Patel neglected a dependent, they leveraged the fact that she sought medication to terminate her pregnancy. They cashed in on well-established abortion stigma and the fact that women of color are not trusted agents of their own reproductive decision-making.