Monday, February 19, 2007

McMissile

On a sticky day in July, Jessica Hall was driving north on Interstate 95 with her children and her sister, who was six months pregnant and having early contractions. Traffic had slowed to a crawl, when, she said, another car cut her off twice. Angered, she flung a McDonald's cup full of ice into the other car, where it flew across the driver and landed all over his girlfriend.
The driver of the other car, Pete Ballin, 36, and his girlfriend, Eliza Fowle, 28, were heading home to the District after visiting her father in North Carolina.
"It was gross and sticky and got all over me and the front of our car, the dashboard and the windshield," Fowle said of the launched drink.
Now Hall faces up to two years in prison because she was convicted by a jury of maliciously throwing a missile into an occupied vehicle, a felony in Virginia. The instructions given to the jury said that any object propelled by force can be considered a missile.
The jury gave Hall the minimum sentence of two years in prison. A judge will formally impose a sentence Wednesday. Under state law, the judge can only decrease the jury's sentence. Hall, whose husband is serving his third tour in Iraq, has spent more than a month in jail.

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