Alyssa Shepherd filed a response Monday to the state’s response to her reckless homicide conviction appeal.
Shepherd, 24, was convicted in October by a jury in Fulton Superior Court of three counts of reckless homicide, Level 5 felonies; a Class A misdemeanor for reckless driving for passing a school bus with the arm extended, causing bodily injury; and criminal recklessness, a Level 6 felony.
Shepherd hit four children around 7:15 a.m. Oct. 30, 2018, as the children were crossing Ind. 25 north of Rochester to get on their school bus. She killed 9-year-old Alivia Stahl and Stahl’s 6-year-old twin brothers, Mason and Xzavier Ingle. Eleven-year-old Maverick Lowe was severely injured from the crash. Shepherd has maintained she did not recognize the vehicle as a school bus.
Fulton Superior Court Judge Greg Heller sentenced Shepherd in December to 10 years in the Indiana Department of Corrections, with four of those years to be served in prison, followed by three years on home detention and the remaining three years suspended to probation. The court also imposed a three-year driver’s license suspension on each reckless homicide conviction and a one-year license suspension on the criminal recklessness conviction. Shepherd had faced 21-1/2 years if given the maximum sentence.
Shepherd appealed her conviction on Jan. 16 on the grounds that she alleges prosecutors failed to prove that she was reckless instead of rather just negligent, among other things.
The Attorney General’s Office filed a response to her appeal on June 25 and maintained that prosecutors did prove she was reckless and that the only argument of Shepherd’s appeal that might need to be revisited by the court is her driver’s license suspension timeline.
On Monday, Stacy Uliana, Shepherd’s attorney, wrote that the state’s arguments that the convictions are supported by sufficient evidence are flawed. Uliana writes that the state’s evidence, at most, proves negligence, for example that Shepherd should have known the vehicle with the flashing bright lights was a bus.
“Failing to recognize a risk she should have foreseen is negligence, not reckless conduct,” Uliana writes. “In contrast to the state’s argument on appeal, the prosecutor at trial never even argued Shepherd realized she was passing a bus because it is an unreasonable inference from the evidence. ... Shepherd never disputed that knowingly driving past a stopped school bus with an extended arm would constitute reckless conduct. Rather, Shepherd argues that the state failed to present sufficient evidence that she made a conscious choice to pass the bus.”
Shepherd is not only appealing her reckless homicide convictions, but is also disputing the Class A misdemeanor of reckless driving, stating it violates double jeopardy. The state agreed that the misdemeanor conviction should be vacated because of that. The last thing Shepherd is arguing is her driver’s license suspensions should run concurrently, not consecutively, as was ordered in her sentence.
Uliana has filed a motion to request an oral argument be heard on this appeal.
