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Pregnant reality star Nicole Richie has served a sentence of just 82 minutes of a four-day sentence for driving under the influence of drugs.
Richie checked into a jail in Los Angeles at 3.15pm on Thursday (10.15am Fri NZT), was released at 4.37pm (11.37am NZT) "based on her sentence and federal guidelines," Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy Maribel Rizo said, without elaborating.
Rizo refused to comment on whether Richie spent her brief sentence in a jail cell.
A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said federal sentencing guidelines dealing with jail overcrowding allowed local officials to reduce the time for Richie and other inmates with similar charges.
Nicole Richie pleaded guilty on July 28 to driving under the influence of drugs and was sentenced to four days in jail, a month after TV co-star Paris Hilton completed a three-week stint behind bars.
The conviction stemmed from a traffic stop in December in which police said she was seen driving the wrong way on a Los Angeles freeway. Officers said she failed a field sobriety test and admitted she had smoked marijuana and taken the prescription painkiller Vicodin.
She also was fined US$2,048, placed on three years probation and was ordered to enroll in a court-supervised rehabilitation programme for two-time offenders.
Richie is several months pregnant with her first child to boyfriend, Good Charlotte singer Joel Madden.
- REUTERS
