A Bensalem Woman Who Kicked A Hatfield, Montco. Police Officer And Medic Given Probation

HATFIELD, PA — A Bucks County woman has been given probation, and must briefly serve out house arrest with electronic monitoring, as her punishment for guilty pleas in a pair of cases stemming from her driving drunk and assaulting responding emergency personnel.

Courtenay Lynde Jernigan, 47, of Bensalem, was given three-and-a-half years of probation and five days of house arrest after she pleaded guilty Tuesday in Montgomery County Common Pleas Court to charges of driving under the influence, resisting arrest and simple assault, according to court records.

News reports show that Jernigan was arrested back in September 2019 after she crashed her vehicle into a metal fence while drunk and then assaulted a responding police officer.

North Penn Now reported on the incident two years ago, citing a criminal complaint that said Jernigan was driving along the 1500 block of Cowpath Road in Hatfield Township on Sept. 20, 2019 just before 6:30 in the evening when she struck a building and appeared to be passed out behind the wheel.

The website stated that after she was taken into custody for allegedly driving impaired, Jernigan kicked a police officer in the groin when the officer was attempting to conduct a search of her person.

Court records show that other charges that had originally been lodged against Jernigan were subsequently dismissed after she pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor counts. One of the charges that was dismissed was a felony count of aggravated assault, according to the Common Pleas Court criminal docket sheet in the case.

Jernigan faced additional criminal charges stemming from a different incident in August 2020, according to a North Penn Now report. Police had been called to a home on East Vine Street in Hatfield to help Jernigan retrieve clothing from the residence, when she was taken into custody for public drunkenness, after which she kicked a paramedic who had been attempting to transfer her from a police car to an ambulance.

Jernigan was also given a sentence of probation stemming from the second incident to run concurrent with the other probation sentence stemming from the charges from the September 2019 incident, court records show.

The docket sheet shows that Montgomery County Common Pleas Court Judge Henry T. Hilles, III, ordered that Jernigan must comply with restrictive conditions of probation.

The docket sheet shows that at the time of her guilty plea to the three charges, Jernigan was schedule to appear before Hilles for a bench trial in the consolidated criminal matters.