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‘Melrose Place’ actress won’t do more time for fatal crash

'Melrose Place' actress won't do more time for fatal crash | iNFOnews.ca
FILE - This Feb. 14, 2013 file photo shows Amy Locane Bovenizer entering the courtroom to be sentenced in Somerville, N.J. for the 2010 drunk driving accident in Montgomery Township that killed 60-year-old Helene Seeman The actress, who served about two-and-a-half years of a three-year sentence, must return to court for a second re-sentencing. (AP Photo/The Star-Ledger, Patti Sapone, File) A

SOMERVILLE, N.J. – A former “Melrose Place” actress convicted in a fatal drunken driving accident won’t have to go back to prison, a judge ruled Friday at a resentencing spurred by an appeals court’s concerns that her original sentence may have been too lenient.

Amy Locane-Bovenizer served about two and a half years of a three-year sentence for the 2010 accident in Montgomery Township that killed 60-year-old Helene Seeman and seriously injured Seeman’s husband, Fred. She was released in 2015.

The actress was convicted of vehicular manslaughter, assault by auto and other offences and faced a sentencing range of five to 10 years on the most serious count. Her defence had argued the crash was an accident.

A state appeals court last July ordered the judge to offer a more detailed justification for why he downgraded Locane-Bovenizer’s sentence to three years. State Superior Court Judge Robert Reed later conceded he erred and should have sentenced her to an additional six months.

Prosecutors had sought a seven-year sentence.

On Friday, the judge said Locane-Bovenizer’s conduct since her release shows she isn’t a threat to society.

The Seemans’ family and friends had harshly criticized the original sentence, and they repeated those criticisms in court Friday.

Locane-Bovenizer appeared in 13 episodes of TV’s “Melrose Place” and in movies including “Cry-Baby,” ”School Ties” and “Secretary.”

According to trial testimony and statements by prosecutors, Locane-Bovenizer drank alcohol at two parties on the afternoon of the crash and was driving with a blood-alcohol level nearly three times the legal limit when her SUV slammed into Fred Seeman’s Mercury Milan as he turned into his driveway.

Locane-Bovenizer’s lawyers argued that a third motorist, whose car the actress had bumped into at a traffic light in the minutes before the accident, distracted her by honking at her and chasing her after being rear-ended.

Locane-Bovenizer still faces a federal lawsuit stemming from the crash.

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