Lawrence woman sentenced to more than 3 years in prison for crash that killed bicyclist
photo by: Chris Conde
Updated at 5:16 p.m. Friday, Sept. 1
A Lawrence woman was sentenced to more than three years in prison on Friday for a crash in August 2021 that killed a 50-year-old bicyclist.
The woman, Kodi Rae Crane, expressed remorse for the deadly crime and asked Judge Amy Hanley that she be given probation with, at most, 60 days in jail, but Hanley rejected that request and sentenced Crane, a mother of five, to 41 months in prison.
“I recognize your remorse,” Hanley said, but “… there’s a life that’s gone.”
On July 25, Crane, 41, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter for the Aug. 4, 2021, crash at the intersection of 15th Street and Haskell Avenue that caused the death of 50-year-old Rachel Snow. Before reaching her plea agreement with the state, Crane had originally been charged with second-degree murder, as the Journal-World reported.
Senior Assistant District Attorney David Greenwald said at Crane’s preliminary hearing in February that police investigators had determined Crane was driving recklessly prior to the crash and that she had multiple drugs in her system, including methamphetamine, marijuana and Klonopin.
During the sentencing, two of Crane’s children addressed the court. Crane’s son told the court that his mother is “not perfect, but no one is,” and he said that his mother, who is also a grandmother, had “some severe mental health issues in addition to addiction.” Crane’s daughter, in making a similar plea for mercy, told the court that her mother was her “best friend” and that Crane had “always been there for her kids.”
photo by: Journal-World
Crane herself told the court that she thought about Snow every day and that she couldn’t imagine “what her family is going through.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t take it back. … It bothers me every day.”
Snow’s sister asked Greenwald to speak on her behalf. Greenwald noted the finality of Crane’s crime: “She’s not coming back,” he said of Snow, and he argued that defense counsel John Kerns offered no substantial reasons to depart from the presumptive prison sentence provided by statute and by Crane’s criminal history score; she has a 2003 conviction for distribution of methamphetamine.
photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World
“At the end of the day, she killed someone,” Greenwald told the court. “… Rachel Snow paid the ultimate price.”
Hanley told the courtroom that such cases, in which a person killed someone while driving under the influence, “are by far the most difficult cases that come before me as a judge, and there are way too many of them.”
She said that it was important to the community’s notion of justice to treat similar cases similarly so that “everyone faces the same accountability.”
Hanley also sentenced Crane to 24 months of post-release supervision and waived Crane’s court costs and fees because she is indigent. Crane will also have to register for 15 years as a violent offender.
Crane, who had been free on a $50,000 bond, sobbed as Hanley imposed the sentence, and she was immediately handcuffed and taken into custody.