It’s safe to say that generally, if you’re in court (whether to support a family member or because of your own actions), it’s not a wise idea to be grinning and/or laughing. People don’t generally end up in court for laughing matters. The family of 26-year-old Amanda Kosal learned that the hard way Thursday after two individuals were removed from the courtroom for allegedly laughing during the sentencing hearing.
Judge Qiana Lillard did not have time for the “clowns”—as she called them—after apparently seeing them smirk and laugh before Kosal was sentenced for killing Jerome Zirker and injuring his fiancee, Brittany Johnson, while driving drunk, Click on Detroit reports.
“It’s time for him to go,” said the judge, lashing out at an unidentified man who was apparently seated with Kosal’s family. “And I don’t know who he is, but whoever can sit here at a tragic moment like this and laugh and smile when somebody has lost a family member ... in the entire time that Mr. Zirker’s sister was speaking, that clown—and that’s what I am going to call him, a clown—was sitting there smiling and laughing.
“And you can go, too,” Judge Lillard added as she asked bailiffs to take a woman into custody for criminal contempt. “Because if you don’t know how to act, you can go to jail. So leave. Anybody that can sit there and laugh and smirk—take her, she’s going in the back—anybody else wanna go? You can go, too. This is a court of law. And these are very serious matters. I understand that you all are very upset because your loved one is going to prison, but guess what? She’s going to prison for the choices that she made. These people are here grieving, saddened because a senseless act took away their loved one and you’re sitting here acting like it’s a joke?”
Lillard said that she was sending the woman—who apparently said something about the judge’s “big mouth”—to jail for 93 days.
“Your disruptive and disrespectful behavior disrupted today’s proceedings and you, ma’am, are going to the Wayne County Jail for 93 days,” she said.
Judge Lillard made it clear that’s not how things go down in her courtroom. Y’all gon’ learn today not to mess with folks.
Video of her righteous anger soon started making the rounds on social media.
In the end, Kosal was sentenced to three to 15 years in prison for a deadly drunken driving crash this past summer in Redford Township, Mich., that left Zirker, 31, dead and his fiancee, Johnson, also 31, severely injured. Kosal had pleaded guilty to operating under the influence causing death.
Zirker’s mother, Rathel Fizer, said she would have preferred that Kosal not go to jail so that she could help support the family she destroyed, since Johnson is now a single mother of five children.
“I want her to stay out and help support my grandchildren because they don’t have a father to take care of them,” Fizer said. “If she goes to prison or jail, I’m taking care of her. I don’t want her to mail a check. I want her to hand-deliver it to them so she can see the faces that she destroyed.”
Read more at Click on Detroit.