William Morgan
A woman who is serving a sentence of 15 years to life after killing her boyfriend and his friend by crashing her car into a wall at 100mph was handed a brutal response when her lawyers filed an appeal to her conviction.
Ohio native Mackenzie Shirilla was 17 years old when the incident took place in July 2022, as she was driving around after spending the night doing drugs with her boyfriend Dominic Russo, 20, and his 19-year-old friend Davion Flanagan.
But just after 5.30am, shortly after leaving a friend's house in Strongsville, Shirilla was captured on CCTV driving her vehicle into a wall at speeds exceeding 100mph. A judge later called this as an attempted murder-suicide that she somehow survived.
Described as 'hell on wheels' after her conviction, Shirilla has so far spent two and a half years of her 15-to-life sentence in Ohio's Reformatory for Women prison, but had hoped to appeal for a new trial. This week, that hope was brutally cut down.
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The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Shirilla's lawyers had in fact filed their initial 2024 appeal 366 days after her conviction, the NY Post reports, with Ohio law stipulating that appeals must be filed within a year of conviction.
So, in other words, the speed killer's lawyers were too slow.
Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge Nancy Margaret Russo, who also oversaw her 2023 conviction, agreed with prosecutors that the appeal had been filed invalidly.
The judge ruled: “Because the appellant filed the petition on the 366th day following the filing of the trial transcript, the trial court was without jurisdiction to consider the merits of the claims, and the application of equitable tolling is prohibited in the context of this jurisdictional bar.”
"The court finds the state's position well-taken, to wit: that the defendant's petition is time-barred as a matter of law, having been filed past the statutory deadline," Russo wrote in her decision.
She added: "As the filing by defendant was untimely, this court is without jurisdiction to consider the merits or arguments of any of the pleadings.
"Therefore, as the defendant's petition is statutorily time-barred and filed out of rule, the court denies the petition for post-conviction relief."
The failed appeal will be welcome news to the families of her victims, who at the time of her conviction had called on the court for her two 15-to-life sentences to run consecutively - meaning that she would spend 30 years behind bars before being eligible for parole.
However, Judge Russo, no relation to the deceased, argued that she would likely spend more than 15 years in prison due to her other sentences, which included drug trafficking after a magic mushroom and scales were found in her vehicle.
At the time of her 2023 conviction, the judge described the incident as 'not reckless driving — this was murder'. Adding: “She had a mission, and she executed it with precision. The decision was death.”
Yet, Dominic Russo's father took a balanced position after the trial, telling NBC.: “It’s horrible for everybody. Yeah, I lost my son, it’s harder on our family, but I don’t want the rest of her life ruined too. It isn’t going to make me feel any better.”