She laughed as the impact statement from the victim’s daughter was being read to the court and found out the hard way that it doesn’t pay to be heartless.
As Amanda Kosal stood waiting to hear the judge’s verdict in her case, the intense moment was exacerbated by her own mother.
Never mess with a judge.
Amanda, from Redford Township, Michigan, had been driving while intoxicated when her vehicle crossed the center line, hitting an oncoming SUV head-on.
31-year-old Jerome Zirker was killed.
He died directly as a result of the accident while his fiancée Brittany Johnson, also 31, was critically injured.
According to reports, Zirker had just picked up Johnson from a 12-hour shift at the group home where she worked.
Usually, their five kids would be with them, but the children were at their grandmother’s house that day.
“Luckily, they were at grandma’s house or it would have been all of us,” Johnson later told WDIV Local 4.
Amanda pled guilty.
Amanda had pled guilty to operating a vehicle under the influence causing death.
Now she and the victims’ families were waiting for Judge Qiana Lillard’s verdict.
Little did anyone know, however, the following scene was about to go viral.
The judge heard snickering.
While awaiting the serious decision, a man in the courtroom is spotted smiling and laughing.
As you can imagine, Judge Qiana Lillard is immediately outraged.
“It’s time for him to go,” she announces suddenly.
“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… I mean, in the entire time Mr. Zirker’s sister was speaking, that clown— and that’s what I’m going to call him, a clown— was sitting there smiling and laughing.”
Apparently, Amanda’s mother didn’t get the memo.
The judge immediately spots her making faces in the back.
“You can go too,” the judge tells Donna Kosal. “Because if you don’t know how to act, you can go to jail.”
Unfortunately, Donna Kosal wasn’t content simply leaving the courtroom. Instead, she started yelling and making a scene on her way out— “further disrupting proceedings,” Judge Lillard later said.
At this point, the judge had enough.
Calling Donna Kosal back into the courtroom, the judge takes her into custody for criminal contempt, ordering her to spend 93 days in jail.
“Anyone else want to go? Try it,” she tells the room.
“I understand that you are all very upset because your loved one is going to prison,” she says, addressing Amanda’s family. “But guess what? She’s going to prison for the choice 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?”
Sentenced to 3 to 15 years.
Amanda would indeed be going to jail from anywhere from 3 to 15 years for her bad choices.
After the trial, Judge Lillard modified Donna Kosal’s sentence to one night in prison— which at that point, she had already spent.
During her time in court, Donna said: “I deeply apologize for what I did; I was under a lot of stress.” In response, Judge Lillard told her:
“What you have to understand is as hard as this is for you to see your baby going to prison, imagine what the family feels like when their child is dead. I hope that you learned a valuable lesson from all this.”
The story immediately went viral.
Since being uploaded, the video has reached over 25 million views on Facebook alone.