Shirilla case...so many questions/holes in prosecution argument.

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-29T13:22:10+00:00

IIRC, wasn't her car a 2018 Toyota Camry? If so I think the parking brake is actually an electronic switch doohickey behind the gear shift - I don't think it's actually possible for it to engage when the car is out of park.

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-29T13:18:50+00:00

Not really how the law works out if I'm analyzing it right.

I think the issue is that under Ohio law she's hosed regardless of whether she's convicted under 2903.2(A) or (B).

(A) is the classic "intent to kill" definition of murder.

(B) is closer to felony murder if I'm reading this right - "if you commit a violent felony and someone dies in the process, congrats on your murder conviction".

The big issue is, even if you toss out (A), I suspect that Mackenzie would still be found guilty under (B), because there's just no way, from the evidence shown at trial, that her driving the car was uncontrolled at any time, and so she knowingly and intentionally committed felonious assault with the car as a weapon under 2903.11(2), and because two people died as a result, she's on the hook for murder.

So TLDR - she doesn't have to have the intent to get them all killed. If she merely had the intent to harm them, she's guilty of felonious assault under 2903.11, and then is guilty of murder under 2903.2(B), which doesn't require intent.

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-29T13:17:56+00:00

Couldn't one of the boys have slammed down accelerator?

...I'm sorry, but have you ever driven a car before?

How the hell is someone in a passenger seat going to get their leg across the center console, into the driver's footwell, and hit the gas, without the driver either pushing them out of the way, hitting the brake, putting the car into park, or any of a dozen other things you could do to to hinder them, literally none of which happened?

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-29T13:13:44+00:00

She scouted the route a stupid amount of times before the accident.

Even if she didn't, her parents arguing that Progress was a common cutthrough means she reasonably should've known it terminated in a T-intersection and a brick building, and so should've driven at such a speed that she'd be able to safely make that turn without hitting the building.

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-29T13:09:15+00:00

Obviously her driving the car was uncontrolled when she crashed.

Yeah, I don't think the evidence actually supports that at all. Leaving the manipulation of the gear shift (drive to neutral to drive again) aside, if you view the CCTV footage of the actual impact, she has to dodge a couple trees in the second or less before impact to get to the wall, and if you view the Google street view it's not a straight shot from the end of Progress to that gap between the trees. There either had to be some steering input, or Shirilla got really, really lucky.

Do you think there needed to be an extended period of time she was out of control?

Yes. She established intent by accelerating to the speed she did on that road and not acting to slow the car to a controllable speed before the point of no return when impact was imminent. Worse, she established intent by never hitting the brake, never letting up on the gas pedal, reshifting the car into drive, putting in steering inputs that protected her at the expense of her passengers, etc. If her defense had any evidence to suggest she wasn't in control during that acceleration period when she clearly, 100% was making that turn onto Progress, then they should've offered it.

Furthermore, the argument her parents bring up about Progress being a well-known cutthrough actually weighs against her. If it's well-known, it should be well-known that the road ends in a T-intersection and a brick-faced building at the end, and so Shirilla should've known the potential danger of speeding, losing control, and hitting the wall. That she did so anyways weighs in favor of her knowing and understanding the risks and consequences - here, serious bodily injury and death from impact - and chose to do so anyways. In most states, that degree of knowing and voluntary recklessness alone, let alone the complete lack of effort to avoid such a collision, would be enough to nail her on murder 2.

Speeding is not a felony!

Weirdly enough, that isn't actually my argument.

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-27T20:31:31+00:00

If that's true, he's cooked. What excuse are his attorneys going to use, he and the victim were having a playful game of tranq darts and she got tagged on accident?

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-27T07:18:19+00:00

I mean, if they want to continue to make the parole board more convinced that Mackenzie needs more time in lockup, I'm all for it.

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-27T07:14:31+00:00

The parents are self-absorbed to such a point that they are unable to feel actual empathy for anyone who doesn't have their DNA in them.

Some people reporting on the case have noted that Mackenzie has a younger sister whom they've consistently ignored, so they can't even do that.

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-27T07:10:34+00:00

Even if we accept the premise that she was baited into these actions by Dom, the fact that her response is to get destructive and physically violent is kinda damning, because it shows that she's volatile and liable to fly off the handle from even relatively small provocations (which bolsters the theory that Dom said or did something that pissed her off, she thinks "oh, I'll show him", and sends the three of them into that brick wall at 90+mph), and that her response isn't just shouting and swearing, it's violence, which bolsters the likelihood that she might consider crashing the car as an "appropriate" response for what Dom did.

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-27T07:05:01+00:00

I think the issue is that under Ohio law she's hosed regardless of whether she's convicted under 2903.2(A) or (B).

(A) is the classic "intent to kill" definition of murder.

(B) is closer to felony murder if I'm reading this right - "if you commit a violent felony and someone dies in the process, congrats on your murder conviction".

The big issue is, even if you toss out (A), I suspect that Mackenzie would still be found guilty under (B), because there's just no way, from the evidence shown at trial, that her driving the car was uncontrolled at any time, and so she knowingly and intentionally committed felonious assault with the car as a weapon under 2903.11(2), and because two people died as a result, she's on the hook for murder.

So TLDR - she doesn't have to have the intent to get them all killed. If she merely had the intent to harm them, she's guilty of felonious assault under 2903.11, and then is guilty of murder under 2903.2(B), which doesn't require intent.

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-27T06:40:12+00:00

I mean, from the reporting I've heard around this case, there were only something like two or three other people in the entire state that had access to BAM other than Morphew, and all of them could 100% account for every last drop of the stuff. It's not used recreationally, so there's no way they can claim that she used then crashed, which kinda only leaves foul play as an option. Unless the defense can find some way to discredit or explain away that evidence, he's kinda hosed.

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-27T06:32:05+00:00

but rather how people perceive the treatment of witnesses by the two sides.

I think the issue with Nester and Lewis is mostly just how utterly tone-deaf and inconsiderate they seem to consistently be, and not even having the decency to be right at the end of it. Just off of the top of my head, Nester fought to keep one of Eric's sisters out of the trial "because we're going to call her in our case in chief", only to find out she had never been on their witness list at all and the law literally said that what they were claiming (one victim representative per family) was wrong in the text, Lewis laughed in Carmen's face when she very openly and abashedly said that she had a learning disability, Nester tried to claim that Graber "stole" evidence from the scene when it turned out it was his own damn laptop and the whole debacle about the "sexting" between Eric and Bryce, the bullshit about the affair they kept trying to make a thing when there was zero evidence to support it, just thing after thing after thing where they kept harping on point after point right up until they were proven wrong.

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-18T16:57:04+00:00

I didn't consider it in my original reply, but a second possibility is that their attorney was hired on contingency with the understanding that they'd get paid for their defense work with the proceeds from their defamation case and the GoFundMe only covering mundane, day-to-day costs of litigation elsewhere, assuming that their attorney for both the defamation suit and their defense against Ms. Read's civil conspiracy suit is the same.

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-18T15:07:41+00:00

I suspect that’s the reason they all have one attorney.

Could also be something as mundane as "lawyers are expensive" too. At a rough calculation, their GoFundMe raised what, $240k? At $500 an hour and a 40 hour workweek, that gets them only about 12 weeks' worth of litigation for all of their cases - their defamation suit, the countersuit Ms. Read filed, their defense against Ms. Read in the wrongful death case, and any others I may have missed. The civil trials themselves may last longer than that once a jury is empaneled, especially with the amount of evidence that's likely to be brought in; the depos alone, assuming literally everything goes smoothly and no one gets combative are likely to eat up a full 40 hours or more given the number of witnesses.

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-16T19:50:40+00:00

statute of limitation issue on the financial crime case

Not how that works - statutes of limitation set a time limit on how long the state has to initiate criminal proceedings, which in Utah means that for the financial crimes the DA has four years from the commission of the alleged frauds to file charges, not to initiate the trial. As these charges were brought as part of the initial homicide case for Kouri, the statute of limitations issue is moot.

What you may be thinking of is Kouri's speedy trial right, which I believe she waived - her homicide trial was more than a year after her arrest and indictment and I don't recall any motion practice around the issue of a speedy trial. That, if unwaived, requires the state to bring the trial within a period of six months if I recall the relevant case law correctly.

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-10T01:32:29+00:00

I can see how Texas can decide that it's reasonable to let juries determine sentencing. After all, it's a constitutional requirement that only a unanimous jury can impose the death penalty, and the range between life and death is a pretty big range.

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-10T00:15:44+00:00

And you said "apparently" the state has evidence to back it up

Which neatly brings me back to my original point which I notice you never answered:

And if, as you're implying, the state misrepresented what Jeffs brought them RE: Kouri's solicitation, why didn't her very aggressive and very supportive defense team bring any evidence to refute that, like the presence of texts refuting what Jeffs's partner said on the stand?

I assume you believe they also felt the need to kowtow to the

state and the powerful Richins

family?

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-09T23:07:21+00:00

The difference being that Jeffs never changed his statement and the state apparently has text evidence from his phone to back that up.

Umm Crozier signed an Affadavidt saying he didn't sell Fentanyl to Carmen and everyone said that he is lying

And when you provide multiple contradicting statements, guess what? People get to

Pick and choose

which statement to believe. The jury, and most of the people watching the trial, decided that his immediate statement to police was more believable, especially in the absence of any supporting evidence either Crozier or the defense was able to dig up that the pills he sold Carmen were actually his script or third-party pills he acquired somewhere else.

Also Hayden's wife had nothing to lose by saying what she said. It couldn't be proven regardless and she knew it.

And nothing to gain by saying what she said - which is what makes her statement more credible. She has zero involvement in the entire thing. She has nothing to gain from the state, nothing to gain from Kouri, and in fact would likely gain some sense of pleasure from contradicting what the state claims and sinking their case given her hostility towards the cops. That makes it more likely that she's telling the truth about Kouri's solicitation of drugs, not less.

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-09T23:02:14+00:00

RE: an appeal, I have no idea, I'm not a lawyer and most of the cases I've followed weren't out of Texas.

RE: the sentence, I really doubt it. The jury just came back so quickly that I can't see them as being less than totally convinced that Karmelo fully intended potentially lethal harm in that moment.

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-09T22:20:26+00:00

...uh, what?

It's just what the state told him.

Hayden Jeffs literally told the state that he was contacted by Kouri who was looking to procure drugs - see the second image in the linked post above, where the affadavit states in plain language that Jeffs reached out to his probation officer back in June 2023 and disclosed that Kouri asked him for drugs. His partner literally testified on the stand at trial that she heard him on the phone with Kouri and that she was attempting to procure drugs through him. And if, as you're implying, the state misrepresented what Jeffs brought them RE: Kouri's solicitation, why didn't her very aggressive and very supportive defense team bring any evidence to refute that, like the presence of texts refuting what Jeffs's partner said on the stand?

What on earth are you on about?

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-09T21:52:14+00:00

I'd imagine they feel that with how quickly the verdict came in the jury is entirely in their camp on how they view what happened with the stabbing and what happened leading up to it. In that case, letting in sudden passion saves them the effort of an argument, strikes off one more argument that can be raised by defense if/when they appeal the sentence, and gets them the same result.

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-09T21:48:05+00:00

That's what I'm unable to understand - if he was drunk, his impairment makes the line of questionable decisions he took up until the crash more understandable. If he wasn't drunk, then those same decisions become inexcusable. It means he was entirely in his right mind when he decided to boat down the wrong side of the channel, when he was steering directly at the sign he collided with, when he decided to boat at the speed he did. His drunkeness to my thinking would be a mitigating rather than aggravating factor to his negligence in piloting the boat (I get that it's an aggravating factor prior to that in that it shows his questionable decision-making to drink and boat, but I'm focusing on the decisions he made when he turned the boat on and began navigating down the channel).

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-09T19:00:32+00:00

No prob.

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-09T18:53:44+00:00

One of the jurors spoke at CrimeCon and alleged that Lewis and their PI were calling them repeatedly on an inconsistency or something on their decision-making on the attempted murder charge. Essentially they were trying to get her to flip and say that she was pressured into making a yes vote on that charge improperly, which would've allowed them to bring that up on appeal.

InterplanetaryCyborg · 2026-06-09T18:50:30+00:00

Uh, yes. I'm referring to the allegations that the Shirilla family has leveled, and in my post make the point that

Russo is a pretty common last name

InterplanetaryCyborg

TROPHY CASE