The Ohio Supreme Court declined to hear Mackenzie Shirilla’s latest appeal Tuesday, leaving in place a ruling that barred her postconviction challenge because it was filed one day late.
A brief entry from the state’s high court said the justices declined to accept jurisdiction in State of Ohio v. Mackenzie Shirilla after considering the jurisdictional memoranda filed in the case. Justice Patrick DeWine dissented from the decision.
Shirilla, 21, had asked the court to review a March ruling from the Eighth District Court of Appeals, which upheld the dismissal of her petition for postconviction relief. The petition raised claims of ineffective assistance of counsel and cited new medical evidence that her lawyers said supported the argument that she may have blacked out before the crash.
Postconviction relief can allow a person convicted of a crime to raise constitutional claims or new evidence outside the trial record. Shirilla’s filing relied on claims about her trial lawyers’ performance and proposed medical evidence, but the courts never weighed those arguments because they found the petition was late.
The timing issue turned on how Ohio counts the filing deadline. State law gives people seeking postconviction relief 365 days after the trial transcript is filed in the court of appeals, not one calendar year from that date. The Eighth District found that, because 2024 was a leap year, the 365th day fell on Oct. 23, 2024. Shirilla filed on Oct. 24, one day after the statutory deadline.
Shirilla’s attorneys argued that the delay should not have prevented review because the filing date was miscalculated during a leap year. The Eighth District rejected that argument, finding that the statute uses a day count rather than a one-year anniversary and that the missed deadline left the trial court without authority to consider the petition.
Shirilla is serving a sentence of 15 years to life after she was convicted in 2023 of murder and other charges tied to a deadly 2022 crash in Strongsville, Ohio.
She was 17 when she drove into a building on July 31, 2022, in the Cleveland suburb of Strongsville. Dominic Russo, 20, her boyfriend, and Davion Flanagan, 19, a friend, were passengers in the car and died in the crash.
Prosecutors argued at trial that Shirilla intentionally drove nearly 100 miles per hour into the building without braking. Her attorneys have disputed that theory, and Shirilla has maintained that she does not remember the crash or the moments before it. She has denied that the deaths were intentional.
The decision is separate from an earlier appeal, also rejected by the Ohio Supreme Court, that challenged whether the evidence proved Shirilla acted purposely.
The case has drawn renewed public attention through true-crime coverage, including Netflix’s The Crash, and episodes of Mean Girl Murders and Killer Cases on Hulu.
Shirilla remains incarcerated at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville.
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