A Los Angeles judge handed down the sentence after prosecutors contended in a two-hour hearing that Hilton had violated her probation when she was ticketed in late February for driving a blue Bentley Continental GTC on Sunset Boulevard with a suspended license. Hilton and her attorneys argued that it was a mistake and that her action did not warrant a jail sentence. Hilton was serving 36 months of probation after pleading no contest to a charge of alcohol-related reckless driving related to her Sept.
7 arrest in Hollywood. She also had been fined $1,500. They pulled the car over near the intersection of Selma and Wilcox avenues and performed several field sobriety tests before handcuffing and arresting Hilton, authorities said.
So many celebrity photographers swarmed the September traffic stop that police had trouble doing their job. The surreal quality of the incident continued at the stationhouse, where reporters and photographers created such a ruckus that the watch commander warned that camera flashbulbs could cause accidents on the street. Inside, police did what they do in most cases, administering a Breathalyzer test to Hilton, which showed that her blood-alcohol level was on the wrong side of California's legal limit of 0.
08%. Then, after the February incident, the city attorney's office had asked the Superior Court judge to jail Hilton for 45 days, saying she violated the terms of her probation for an alcohol-related reckless driving conviction. They also asked that she stay away from alcohol for 90 days, wear a monitoring device and have her license suspended for an additional four months.
Hilton arrived at the courthouse about 15 minutes late in a Cadillac Escalade. Moments later Paris Hilton emerged from the Cadillac along with her mother, Kathy Hilton. Conservatively dressed in a British jockey suit, with grey jacket and black pants, the hotel heiress appeared as stone-faced as her modeling days in New York City during fashion week.
But instead of gliding down the red carpet, Hilton made her way up the steps of the courthouse roped off from the throngs of reporters and photographers by yellow police crime scene tape. Members of the media clamored at the courthouse door as Hilton, her mother and several assistants made it through security and prepared to take the elevator to the courtroom on the sixth floor. Only about a dozen spectators or Hilton fans were on hand.
Rachel Chavarria, 19, shot photos of Hilton on her cellphone camera. She said she was there to pay a speeding ticket and had to wait ten minutes to get into the building. "If she goes to jail, which she should, she deserves it," Chavarria said.
"She had the money and should have called a chauffeur or a taxi and that shows how stupid she is. It's like she's one of those celebrities looking to get attention at any cost." Her friend, Selene Sanchez, 19, was equally unimpressed with the media spectacle.
"What it seems people care about more now isn't God, the war or poverty. It's about if Lindsay's on drugs, If Britney's shaving her head or Paris is going to jail," Sanchez said. "It's just absolutely disturbing to see what we care about now.
" Construction workers building a parking structure across the street from the courthouse yelled "Jail time!" to the group of more than two dozen TV crews who had gathered in front of the court before the 1:30 p.m.
hearing. "Upstairs, they are telling us how we should treat everyone equally with fairness and justice," said Rocco Jimenez, 21, a juror on another case. "Now, here they are shutting down one whole entrance for one person.
It's ridiculous. This is the way we do the justice system in L.A.
There's no place like it.
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