Canadian Guppies in particular might remember this most dreadful murder - it received massive coverage on CBC (who had initially been attracted to this along the lines of wanting to portray an arranged marriage). Anyways, the lady at the centre of it is back at home in Saskatoon, Canada, having served 18 months of a jail sentence.
Scary to even read stuff like this.
~ ~ ~
The trials of Alpna Patel, CBC, May 2003
It was an arranged marriage portrayed in a CBC documentary as a happy event in the lives of two young people doing what tradition had taught them. But it ended with the death of the husband and two long murder trials of the wife.
Alpna Amin lived most of her life in Saskatoon. She was raised in North American culture, but held closely to the traditional values of her Hindu parents. They came to Canada from India and, like so many Canadians, instilled a deep connection to tradition in their daughter.
So after she had her profession in hand, this dentist decided that she would like to get married in a traditional, arranged Indian ceremony.
She and her family found her a perfect husband in Viresh Patel. He was a medical student from Buffalo, N.Y. They married in May 1998.
“I could just tell that there was definitely something between us, some kind of chemistry, I guess you could call it, between the two of us. And I just knew somehow that she was the one,” Viresh Patel said at the time of the wedding.
The honeymoon ended quickly and Alpna Patel found herself living in Buffalo with her in-laws while her new husband began a medical residency in Baltimore.
"I went into this marriage with dreams and with hopes and with the thought of this being the one and only marriage, as most people do," she says today.
Alpna had also been raised to be a strong-minded, modern, independent woman and this eventually led to clashes with her traditional Hindu father-in-law. She says that he treated her as nothing more than a household servant.
“He was very dictatorial, very controlling, very demanding and just incredibly interfering,” she now says of her father-in-law. “I think he just had issues with control. He had to have everybody in the palm of his hand and he didn’t allow anybody any freedom to think or to do what they wanted.”
Alpna Patel thought her father-in-law bullied his wife and monitored everybody’s actions. He explained it as just being protective. “I lived in America for the last 30 years,” Nandlal Patel told the National Magazine in 2000. “All my children are born in America. I know how we work here. So it is not dictatorship. I do provide a proper guide. I do help the kids.”
When Alpna said she wanted to accompany her mother-in-law on her regular trips to Baltimore to visit Viresh, she was denied. So Patel took matters into her own hands and went to visit her husband with a list of 39 concerns she had about the situation. When she arrived, she says, she pleaded with Viresh to address her concerns in an effort to save the marriage. She intended to go back to Saskatoon if something wasn’t done.
What happened next is now the stuff of courtroom drama. According to what Alpna Patel told police and repeated several times in testimony, she awoke to find her husband straddling her and holding a knife to her throat. She described a physical confrontation that ended with her husband bleeding on the floor.
Patel was charged with murder and a legal odyssey ensued. Nine months later, in January of 2000, Patel’s murder trial began in Baltimore. One of her lawyers set himself the task of presenting a conflict of cultures, one that ended with a young woman locked into a repressive life with a family that would not allow her the freedoms a western life had given her.
“People need to understand a lot of the cultural subtleties in this case to be able to make a judgment in this matter,” lawyer Chirag Patel (no relation) said. “I mean, it’s not a typical western situation or western marriage. I mean there’s elements of both East and West in the case, and that’s going to all play out in the days ahead.”
In the end, a jury made up of 11 women and one man could not decide on whether Alpna Patel was guilty of murder. The only man on the jury held out at giving Patel a complete acquittal. The jury remained deadlocked and the case had to be retried. Seven months later, another defence attorney attempted to pick up where the last case left off. This time, the prosecution trimmed down its case and rested far earlier than the defence had expected.
“I was caught flat-footed when he rested very quickly in the trial, to be quite honest with you,” says Alpna Patel’s second defence lawyer, Ed Smith. “I thought they’d put in more evidence.” After three days of deliberation, the jury of 10 women and two men came back with a guilty verdict on the charge of voluntary manslaughter, or intentional killing without premeditation.
She was sentenced to three years in a Baltimore jail.
Maryland Judge John Prevas hears about 40 trials a year and says he won’t soon forget this one. “It has such compelling human interest. I empathize with her. I empathize with him and his family,” he says. “It was gripping. Two very nice people trying to make a wonderful marriage and all of a sudden one’s dead and the other is going whoops!”
On the basis of comments made by the prosecutor in his closing arguments, Alpna Patel launched her appeal. It would take two years and Patel would be out on parole, but those statements were enough for a judge to call Patel’s second trial into question.
“Poor, oppressed Alpna Patel: credit cards, airplane tickets, driving places, Toronto, Florida, Canada. Poor little rich girl. Poor little rich girl,” were the comments that were vociferously objected to by the defence. They were enough for a judge to send the case back for a retrial.
Four years after having what has been described as a fairy tale wedding, after two murder trials and 18 months in jail, Alpna Patel finally returned to Saskatoon. She describes her time in jail as the most difficult of her life. “You don’t even believe it’s occurring,” she says, “and, obviously, I was extremely fearful. That entire time was nothing but dark.”
“We felt like we lost everything,” says her father Dev Amin. “We had no control over our own child. It was like something of your own person being taken away from you without any authority.”
A Baltimore assistant state attorney, Larry Doan, regrets the mistrial decision, but finally, after four months, decided that trying Patel again would not obtain any more justice than had already been meted out.
“Clearly if the prosecutor had not made the comments he made you’d have a conviction that stood,” Doan says, “There’s no more time that she could be given in a third trial and it was the feeling here that we had received as much justice as we were going to get from the process.”
Patel says that Maryland purposely delayed its decision not to retry the case. “I think they deliberately wanted to cause me hardship and cause me difficulty in obtaining my justice because they knew they made a mistake, but they were too lame to admit their mistake and so they just kept on perpetuating it and drawing and delaying out the justice.”
Baltimore Sun reporter Tim Craig says that the case ended as it should. “It kind of ended like you’ll never know. And in some way that may be appropriate, considering the circumstances, that you’ll never know because it’s not a clear-cut case. So perhaps in some way it ended in the best possible way.”
Judge John Prevas has fewer doubts about what happened the night Viresh Patel died. “Turn down the sound and just look at the physical facts, the placement of the glasses, the placement of the blood and her skill as a doctor in terms of the placement of the wound. I was finally convinced she stabbed first. She wasn’t fending off an attack from a heavier man. So if that’s the case… was justice done?”
Alpna has a renewed spirituality and has strengthened ties to her culture and traditions. “I still don’t regret the time I had with my husband,” she says. “I loved him very much and I think we had a great marriage.”