<\/strong>Davion Flanagan. Shirilla, the driver, was eventually sentenced to two consecutive life terms in an Ohio women\u2019s prison after a judge ruled that she deliberately drove her 2018 Toyota Camry directly into a brick wall at more than 90 miles per hour.<\/p>\nWhile the case had previously been covered on HBO\u2019s Mean Girl Murders<\/em> and and Hulu\u2019s Killer Cases<\/em>, its May 15 Netflix release catapulted it to stratospheric new levels of public awareness. It\u2019s not hard to see why. The whole thing is true crime catnip: Shirilla comes off as an entitled wanna-be influencer with a massive internet footprint, overly permissive parents, and a contentious romantic relationship history with Russo, 20, who showers her with designer gifts paid for, apparently in cash, with money from \u201ccrypto investments.\u201d The entire friend group is portrayed as Sam Levinson\u2019s Euphoria<\/em> come to life, where everybody involved is privileged, addicted to weed or mushrooms, and bored.<\/p>\nIn one clip that\u2019s since gone viral, Shirilla\u2019s mother, Natalie, addresses the court at her daughter\u2019s sentencing and all but shrugs away Davion Flanagan\u2019s death by saying, \u201che was a new friend.\u201d<\/p>\n
YouTube and TikTok Nation are activated<\/em>. Countless prison phone calls between Mackenzie and her mother have been released online, each signaling some new element of the case: her prison romances, her lack of remorse, her glee at the film\u2019s popularity, her hope that Kim Kardashian takes on her case. She\u2019s alleged to have sugar daddies putting money on her books, prison godmothers watching out for her on the yard, a lucrative but undisclosed prison business, a waist trainer. Sleuths have tracked down her high school disciplinary records. Her father, Steve Shirilla, was suspended from his job as a digital media teacher at a local Catholic high school over his comments in the film about being happy his daughter smoked weed \u201cinstead of shooting up.\u201d It\u2019s been reported that he won\u2019t return.<\/p>\nThe only redeeming person in the whole thing seems to be Davion\u2019s adopted father, Steve Flanagan, who is portrayed as the film\u2019s moral center. But even he seems, perhaps understandably, lost in bloodthirsty vengeance. Eventually he reflects on people\u2019s capacity to change, and his hope that Mackenzie\u2019s parents learn to hold her accountable. As for an appropriate punishment? He wants his son\u2019s life to have concrete value, he says about the prospect of the judge issuing a sentence of either of at least 15 years to life.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf that were 30, I\u2019d be happier with that,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
As a culture, we\u2019ve been to this place before. It was called the 1990s and it was not particularly fun for whole swaths of people who were young, poor, or of color. Prison populations soared, communities were wrecked, and most of the damage was underwritten by salacious coverage of crimes perpetrated by young people whom judges and the media wrote off as irredeemable.<\/p>\n
For a small pocket of time, just before and during the pandemic, we seemed ready to reckon with damage wrought by those punitive impulses. The Supreme Court even ruled that sentencing juveniles to life without the possibility of parole constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Shirilla, at least, will be eligible for parole\u2014in 2037. But at sentencing, in August of 2023, Judge Nancy Russo (no relation to Dominic) didn\u2019t seem optimistic. \u201cI understand that the pain in this room wants me to impose the harshest sentence,\u201d Russo said. \u201cBut I don\u2019t believe that would be the appropriate sentence because I do believe that Mackenzie will not be out in 15 years.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, in other words, it\u2019s not worth sentencing Shirilla to the maximum because she\u2019s\u2026probably going to wind up serving most of it anyway?<\/p>\n
Likability is not a pre-requisite for freedom. The frenzy over this film shows that we have learned nothing from the hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed by an overzealous punishment system egged on by pop culture. We\u2019re now hurtling dangerously toward a new nadir, one where the tough-on-crime tactics of the \u201990s gets recast, its razor-sharp edges sanded down with the help of a new filter.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dominic Russo with Mackenzie Shirilla.Netflix Get your news from a source that\u2019s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. Maybe I\u2019m leaning too much into The Discourse, but here\u2019s this mind-boggling thing happening on the internet with the internet\u2019s latest supervillian. Mackenzie Shirilla is the\u2014star? protagonist?\u2014of a new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2457,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-usa-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2456\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}