Dischman sentenced to state prison She gets term of 1 to 2 years
A 32-year-old woman's long criminal history with the county dating back to her teens may have ended Thursday when she was sentenced to state prison.
As part of a plea deal, Kasey Dischman of Butler pleaded guilty on April 29 to charges in two cases, while a third case against her was dropped. All three cases involved drugs.
Judge William Shaffer sentenced Dischman to one to two years in prison and one year of probation for endangering the welfare of a child in 2017 after she overdosed while seven months pregnant. Dischman originally faced a more serious charge of felony aggravated assault of an unborn child, but that was dropped by the court later that same year. As part of her plea deal, Dischman also pleaded guilty to possession of drug paraphernalia.
The sentence Dischman received would typically send a person to county prison, but she requested that her sentence be transferred to state prison.
“This court is well familiar with Ms. Dischman,” her public defender Joseph Smith told the court during sentencing. “Hopefully, this will be a new start.”
In her second case, Shaffer sentenced Dischman to one year of state probation for possessing drug paraphernalia in 2018.
Dischman had been accused of overdosing June 22, 2017, while she was seven months pregnant. Prosecutors with the District Attorney's office argued that Dischman's use of drugs and subsequent overdose was an assault against her in utero baby. But Smith argued in 2017 that the charge was misapplied, with which Shaffer agreed and threw out.
In September, a Superior Court reaffirmed Shaffer's decision, citing a law drafted by former state Rep. Dennis O'Brien in the 1990s.
On Thursday, Dischman appeared in court wearing a county jail-issued orange jumpsuit. Dischman has been in jail since March 24 after police arrested her for violating her probation by running away and destroying her electronic monitoring device. Shaffer credited Dischman's time in jail to her state prison sentence.
