Jury to decide DUI case, again

PALMER — Jurors are expected to continue deliberations today in the case of Renee Ellison.

That would be her second jury. For her second trial.

Ellison, 24, was due to stand trial last year on three charges stemming from a drunken driving incident, but during jury selection, her attorneys reached a plea agreement — five years to serve in prison with an additional three suspended in exchange for a guilty plea to second- and third-degree assault plus misdemeanor DUI, assistant district attorney Mike Walsh said Monday outside of court.

When it came time for sentencing, though, Superior Court Judge Beverly Cutler balked, throwing out the plea agreement. That sent the case to trial where Ellison was convicted on all counts: driving under the influence, assault and reckless driving.

After her conviction, Cutler granted a motion for a new trial based on new evidence the defense brought forward post-conviction. Asked Thursday afternoon what that new evidence was, Walsh said he couldn’t talk while the jury deliberated. Attempts to reach Ellison’s attorney, public defender Bruce Brown, failed.

The saga began early in the morning of June 18, 2006, when Ellison was in a car accident. She was eventually arrested, charged with driving drunk when she hit a taxi cab after running a red light heading toward Palmer on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway at Seward-Meridian Parkway, Alaska State Trooper Chris Long testified at trial.

Ellison was hospitalized after the crash with a gash on her head.

In tapes played at court of interviews Long conducted at the hospital, Ellison denied running the light, saying it turned yellow as she entered the intersection and that the cab T-boned her.

Long disagreed, saying, “I understand you’re saying that but I’ve got two sides of the story.”

The accident left the cabdriver, Kim Alred, and her passenger, Jason Hamilton, hospitalized. Both testified during Ellison’s three-day trial this week.

Hamilton, a Fred Meyer cashier, said he’d walked to the Tesoro station on that corner early that morning to catch the cab to work. The cab didn’t get far before the crash.

“The airbag hit me pretty hard … it took this part of my face off.” Hamilton said, indicating the right side of his face, which he said was scraped up and scabbed over for three or four days after the accident,

Alred was much more seriously injured, with broken vertebrae in her lower back. She testified the accident took her out of work for a number of months and that she lost her house as a result. Under questions Brown asked outside the jury’s presence about back troubles in the years before the accident, Alred testified, “Those fractures weren’t there prior to your client running the light.”