Tuesday, Apr 17, 2007
On April 10th, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the conviction of Ronald Shugart, who was one of two people sentenced in the case. Shugart, then a resident of Coolidge, Texas, was sentenced in 2006 to 20 years in prison on one count of kidnapping and 12 years and five months on one count of carjacking. Annette Thiem of Florence, South Carolina, received a nine-year sentence on the same two charges. Thiem was tried separately and was convicted. She was not a party to Tuesday's appeal. The pair also was ordered to pay $4,873 in restitution for damages to the victim's car during the kidnapping. According to the court record, Shugart and Thiem were staying in a hotel near the Mississippi River when, on May 1, 2005, they walked to the Louisiana Circle overlook and forced Shane Gilmore and Heather Pritchard at knifepoint to drive away with them. Authorities said the teenagers were eating breakfast in a car on a Sunday before going to church. They were reported missing by their families later in the day. Pritchard's Dodge Neon was driven to South Carolina, where it was involved in an accident on Interstate 26 near Laurens. There, Gilmore freed himself and told a state trooper who had responded to the accident that he and Pritchard were captives, according to the court record. Thiem and Shugart were arrested at the scene. The 5th Circuit dismissed Shugart's arguments that the lower court erred in allowing evidence of carjacking and robbery to be used to convict him of kidnapping. "The evidence was part of a single criminal episode, and therefore was intrinsic to the kidnapping charge," the court said. "Additionally, because kidnapping and carjacking have distinctive elements, there is no double jeopardy violation." The 5th Circuit rejected Shugart's claim that the Mississippi court should have disallowed the statements Gilmore and Pritchard made to emergency personnel after the South Carolina accident. "The statements, however, were made immediately after the car accident, while the teenagers were still in Shugart's clutches; they were plainly admissible as excited utterances," the court said. An "excited utterance" is exempt from the normal rule against hearsay evidence. The courts have defined an excited utterance as statements made by someone "under the stress of excitement caused by the event or condition" and are trustworthy because the speaker would have no time to make up a lie. Click on “More Information” below to see the original incident report.
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