Janice Hull mounted, waved to the girl who cared for the stable and rode off.  The farm had nearly five hundred acres of every kind of terrain.  Twenty minutes later she was tiring of riding.  Bored was actually the proper word.  Janice was bored with life.  She headed the horse back to the stable at a full gallop.  She decided that shopping may be more fun today. 

While Janice was riding Sue Nace stood in a courtroom facing the Judge Carl Kerr.  The short trial was over a week ago.  The selection of the jury and the prosecution’s case took just over two days.  The prosecutor took till ten thirty on the third day.  The court recessed till one PM.  The defense case took till three thirty. The jury deliberations were over before five.  The jury convicted her of ten counts of embezzlement and one count of homicide.  This morning she would be sentenced.  With her drug habit when she was caught she didn’t even have enough money to hire a lawyer. The court appointed a public defender fresh out of law school.  To say the defense he presented was ineffective was to grossly overrate it.  The judge sentenced her to the maximum of twenty five to life.  The DA dropped the drug charges if she would agree to counseling in prison. 

On the way back to the stable Janice pushed the horse hard and about a hundred yards from the stable decided to take the horse over a fence to save some time.  The horse stumbled and fell a few steps short the fence.  Janice’s right foot caught momentarily in the stirrup and spun her around as she was thrown up and forward toward the fence.  Without that turn her belly would have taken the impact with the fence and she would probably have died from internal bleeding before she got to the hospital.  With the turn her back took the impact.  One vertebra was totally crushed and two adjacent to it were partially crushed and the remainder of them displaced.  The pieces of the crushed vertebra obliterated more than three inches of her spinal cord while the displacement of the other two cut it at two other places.  

Janice felt intense pain in her right leg as she was being thrown then nothing but pain in her back and left arm when she hit the fence.  The girl who cared for the horses saw her coming as she led a horse out of the stable to exercise it and saw her fall.  She climbed on an already saddled horse and rode out to where Janice was laying.  She saw no bleeding but from a couple scrapes.  Janice was breathing.  Actually the girl knew she was breathing before she got close because she could hear Janice swearing loudly at the horse for the fall.  The girl took out her cell and called 911.  Janice wanted her to lift her off the fence.  Janice swore at her profusely for not obeying and threatened to have her fired.  The girl recognized the potential for spinal injury and wisely refused to move her.  With a broken arm and not being able to use her legs she was unable to free herself.  It took the EMT’s over twenty minutes to get on site.  The language from Janice got more and more hateful with the passing time.