In February of last year a 22-year-old Bloomberg aide, Erinn Phelan, was struck by a 1993 Acura Legend after pushing a friend out of the car's path. Phelan remains in a vegetative state but today, at least, her family saw some justice served against the woman who was driving the Acura, 30-year-old Frances Jasmin. "You must be punished in the most-severe way, but it hardly seems adequate," Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Joseph McKay said before imposing the maximum sentence of 1 1/3 to four years behind bars for the class D felony of leaving the scene of an accident. The judge also recommended that her driver's license be revoked forever.
McKay went on to call Jasmin's actions "despicably irresponsible, dangerous and cowardly from start to finish." After hitting Phelan, Jasmin stuck around the scene for a little while and made between 50 and 70 phone calls. But not one was to 911—they were all to friends she'd just been at a bar with.
Today's sentencing also included emotional pleas from Phelan's mother and sister, who talked of how her Erinn went "from being a young woman who held her head up high, to a person in a persistent vegetative state who can't hold her head at all."
"You have deprived Erinn of a promising future," Phelan's mother told Jasmin in court. "You may have been found guilty, but Erinn is serving the maximum sentence."
