For years, Chuck Poehlman couldn't imagine anything less than an execution for the man who sexually assaulted and strangled his 17-year-old daughter after hiring her to baby-sit his nephew. Even after the convicted killer's death sentence was overturned, Poehlman was adamant that prosecutors ought to pursue the death penalty the second time around.
But the Carroll County man has relented, finally signing off this year on a plea agreement designed to end the years of roller coaster-like appeals that so many victims' families experience in capital cases while also ensuring that a murderer will spend most, and perhaps all, of his life behind bars.
John A. Miller IV is scheduled to be sentenced today in Baltimore County Circuit Court, where the maximum sentence that can be imposed is life in prison without the possibility of parole, according to the plea agreement that he accepted in August.
Poehlman, in an interview earlier this year, said he was "trying to adopt a little more distance and spirituality."
"It was out of my control that Shen got murdered, out of my control that John Miller got the death penalty, out of my control that the judges overturned it," he said then. "It's all out of my control."
Today's hearing, though, might not bring the finality that prosecutors and defense attorneys had hoped for when they crafted the plea agreement.
Miller, 35, has since filed a motion to withdraw the guilty plea that he entered in August, arguing that his lawyers "tricked" him into accepting prosecutors' offer and asking the judge to appoint new counsel to represent him.
Defense attorney Jerri Peyton-Braden, a public defender who has represented Miller since 1998, declined to comment on the case or today's hearing.
Prosecutor Robin S. Coffin has worked on the case just as long.
"The Poehlmans would love it to end now," she said.
Shen Poehlman was killed July 28, 1998, not long after graduating from Liberty High School, where she was a tennis champion, the prom queen and an honors student. She had won a scholarship to study marine biology at Florida State University and was scheduled to leave for school just two weeks after her death.
On July 27, Shen spent the day at a Reisterstown pool where a friend of hers was working that summer as a lifeguard. The pool was associated with an apartment complex where Miller was living with his girlfriend, according to a transcript of the statement of facts that was read at the August plea hearing.
