A Shawano woman with a serious drug problem and several drug convictions was sentenced Oct. 14 in federal court to 47 months in prison for possessing with the intent to distribute methamphetamine.
In September 2024, Dianna L. Chevalier, 41, was riding in a car chased by Shawano County sheriff’s deputies on the Menominee Indian Reservation, according to court records. When the car went into a ditch, Chevalier and two other riders fled but were stopped by law enforcement.
Chevalier told them that she had meth in her bra and police allowed her to remove 0.13 grams of meth while police recovered 1.53 ounces in total from the riders.
Chevalier was first charged in tribal court and received a one-year jail sentence and a two-year banishment from the reservation, which ends in September 2027.
In the past several years, she has three prior felony convictions for meth possession in Shawano County and three in Brown County for meth or cocaine plus other misdemeanor convictions for other offenses.
Drugs have been the “common thread for most if not all of those convictions,” her attorney, Krista Halla-Valdes, wrote to the court.
A drug addict since she was a teenager, Chevalier said that drugs were around the house she grew up in. When she was in eighth grade, she sold cocaine her father had given her. The first time Chevalier used cocaine was with her father when she was 19.
At 26, she turned to meth and became hooked on it. In the past 20 years, the longest she has stayed away from drugs was from 2018-21.
“(Chevalier’s) serious drug problem has led to her own self-destruction more than anything else,” Halla-Valdes wrote.
Chevalier was indicted on a meth charge in federal court in December and pleaded guilty in May. The parties agreed to recommend a sentence of up to five years in prison to run concurrent with the sentences she receives in her Shawano County drug cases. She also received 13 months credit toward her federal sentence for time she has served for her conviction in tribal court.
Halla-Valdes requested her client be incarcerated at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, where she can participate in a drug treatment program.
District Judge William Griesbach put Chevalier on five years’ supervised release after she completes her prison sentence.
