She also was charged with driving without a license, failure to comply with the order of a police officer and other driving infractions.
Under cross-examination by the prosecutor, Donkers gave even more details of what she was doing when she was talking to her husband with the trooper trailing her.
Donkers said she was taking notes — on a piece of paper on the steering wheel of her Chrysler Sebring convertible — for an unrelated court case in which she and her husband are involved.
“I had a piece of paper on the steering wheel, and I was writing something down — with my right hand,” Donkers said.
When Scahill asked her where her child was as she was doing that, she replied that the baby was “nursing on the nursing pillow” in her lap.
“So,” Scahill said, “now you’re going down the turnpike, writing on a piece of paper…with your infant in your lap?”
The car she drove had license plates from Michigan, where the child-restraint law has a nursing-baby exception.
Excerpted from Akron Beacon Journal.