Overheated driver doesn’t deserve the cooler

Give me a Big Gulp. Or supersize me. Well, I do declare, ladies, better watch where you throw an ice-filled cup from now on.

In my best Southern belle accent, I ask you, whoever thought that showering a hot body hopping all over the highway, using a chilly drink to cool that body down on a sizzling summer day, would land a Sistagirl in the steamy slammer for two long years?

Jessica Hall, a 25-year-old mother of three from Jacksonville, N.C., finds herself facing a sticky situation tomorrow when a Stafford County, Va., judge formally sentences her for “maliciously throwing a McDonald’s cup of ice into a car that cut her off on the highway.”

And the aggressive D.C. driver at whom Hall aimed the cup? No repercussions.

We’ve all driven in Hall’s hot tire tracks a time or two, and I bet the vision of throwing more than regretful gestures has crossed our minds. Hey, I can think of a long list of folks I’d like to lob a McMissile at, including the gridlocked legislators in the Virginia General Assembly who can’t seem to get a transportation bill out of the regular session for yet another year.

After all, traffic congestion played a part in the McMissile case.

Initially groggy, I mistook the McMissile case as part of the WTOP radio morning commuter report or a candidate for Monday’s “Knuckleheads in the News.” But I was awake enough to ask aloud, who is the real knucklehead in this case: the defendant or the jury? Those icy McMissiles can pack more punch than a mint julep. Hall was wrong, but to what criminal standard should she be held? I’d submit a misdemeanor rather than a felony, since no one was seriously injured.

“We didn’t think it would go this far. Two years! What did I do?” Hall said in an interview in the Other Paper.

Justice cannot be served by having the mother of three children sit in a prison cell for two years after suffering a fit of temporary insanity on the highway. Her absence at their vulnerable ages of 4, 6 and 8 could create even bigger consequences for society.

Clearly, as Hall stated from the Rappahannock Regional Jail, “I must have been wrong … but seriously, God, lesson learned.”

Not the best example for the young ones, true. But it’s understandable that this harried housewife, whose husband is on his third tour of duty in Iraq, might have been a little on edge when the bobbing and weaving driver from the District cut her off, not once but twice.

Ironically, the impatient driver told the OP that he was maneuvering in slow traffic and didn’t even notice Hall.

The tossing trouble got started when they were traveling along the congested Interstate 95 corridor on July 2. Hall was attempting to follow her father’s truck on the unfamiliar route to a family gathering in New York.

She was driving with a carload of children and her pregnant sister, who was forced against the dashboard when Hall swerved to avoid the target of her impending McMissile.

Admittedly angry, she lost it and flung the cup over her car and into the other car, where it flew across the driver and landed on his girlfriend. Her showered victims — Pete Ballin, 36, and Eliza Fowle, 28, — called police. Surely, in hindsight, Hall wishes she had done that herself.

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