State Seeks to Put Driver in Fatal Crash Back in Jail

The state attorney general’s office filed a motion in Municipal Court on Wednesday urging that a 19-year-old woman be placed back into custody to serve the remainder of her one-year jail term for killing a man while driving drunk last year.

Renee Reid, who lives in Lakeside, served 31 days of her sentence before being placed in an electronic surveillance program that allowed her to remain home instead of in jail.

That decision, by the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, stirred protest on television and radio talk shows amid demands by the local Mother’s Against Drunk Driving chapter for stiffer sentences in drunk driving cases, particularly when someone is killed.

“We are looking at the seriousness of the crime,” said Rhonda Cartwright, a deputy state attorney general who prosecuted the case against Reid, whose father is an investigator with the county district attorney’s office.

“The home detention program is not appropriate in this case,” she said. “The Sheriff’s Department took it upon itself to play probation department and judge in deciding how long Renee Reid should spend in jail.”

Cartwright said she will ask Municipal Court Judge Terry Knoepp, who sentenced Reid, to remove her from home detention and “make sure her 365 days in jail are served.” A court date is set for April 13.

Last July, Reid, speeding along a frontage road in Lakeside, plowed into bicyclist Phil Cramer, who was tossed over a six-foot chain-link fence into the middle of adjacent Interstate 8. Cramer’s friend, John Drogitis, had been directly in front of Cramer during the accident but was not injured.

Then 18, Reid pleaded no contest to vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence after her blood-alcohol level was disclosed to be nearly double the legal limit.

Knoepp sentenced her to a year in jail and five years’ probation and fined her $1,000 at a hearing in which Reid begged Cramer’s widow, Lori, and Drogitis for forgiveness.

Interviewed last week, Knoepp said he was not informed of Reid’s release but was satisfied with his sentence. It was up to the Sheriff’s Department, he said, to decide whether an inmate was eligible for home surveillance.

Male offenders, who are supervised by the county Probation Department, must serve at least half their sentences before becoming eligible for home surveillance unless otherwise ordered by a judge. Women are under no such policy.

The program, designed to ease jail crowding, requires an offender to wear an electronic bracelet that automatically notifies the Sheriff’s Department if he or she is more than 50 yards away from the telephone.

Sheriff’s spokesman Dan Greenblat said, “If the judge so orders that she be returned, the sheriff will immediately comply.”

If Knoepp grants the state’s request, Reid will probably be granted as time served the six weeks she has already spent under electronic surveillance, Cartwright said, and eventually may only have to spend another six to eight months in jail.

Lori Cramer said she supports the state’s decision to file the new motion.

“I have said all along that the punishment did not fit the crime,” Cramer said. “If she has to go in and serve her sentence, well, that’s what the original sentence was for. If the (state attorney general’s) office feels she should go back into custody, so be it.”