Despite having already served her sentence for a deadly DUI crash in June 2010, Melrose Place actress Amy Locane-Bovenizer may end up back in prison after an appeals court ruled her sentence was too lenient.
Locane-Bovenizer, 44, was behind the wheel in the fatal crash that killed Helene Seeman and critically injured Seeman’s husband. Her blood-alcohol level was more than triple the legal limit at the time. Locane-Bovenizer was convicted of vehicular homicide and assault by auto, ultimately serving two-and-a-half years of a three-year sentence before being released on parole in June 2015.
But NJ.com reported that the state’s Superior Court Appellate Division ruled last Friday that the judge in the case had not provided a sufficient explanation for the shorter sentence. Although the appeals court didn’t recommend a proper sentence length, the case has now been sent back to Somerset County and a new hearing will attempt “to comprehensively explain the reasons for sentence.”
The Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office initially appealed her sentence back in 2013, arguing that most individuals on those charges serve five to 10 years behind bars and Locane-Bovenizer faced up to 15 years. The office claimed it sent a “bewildering message” about what the penalty for drunk driving entails.
In the February 2013 sentencing, Judge Robert Reed explained his lenient prison stint by citing that Locane-Bovenizer had two small children, including a young daughter who suffers from Crohn’s disease who was four years old at the time. Seeman’s family expressed outrage, with Helene’s husband, Fred, shouting that “having a sick child doesn’t give you a pass to kill my wife!”
Locane-Bovenizer expressed remorse, sobbing as she apologized to the Seeman family. She told them that she had never “cried tears like these … I am so sorry that we are all connected this way because of my actions. I pray that you will forgive me one day and I pray that God grants us all peace.”
But even behind bars, she continued to feud with the victim’s family in a civil lawsuit filed by Fred Seeman. Locane-Bovenizer reportedly refused to settle the case because the family requested more money than is allowed by insurance policy limits. Court documents filed by her attorneys also claim that she had offered the family $1.5 million, the maximum allowed by the insurance policy limits.
Locane-Bovenizer appeared as Sandy on 13 episodes of Melrose Place in 1992. She appeared in several theatrical releases and TV movies throughout the ‘90s and early 2000s, but has not had a role since 2005.