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 honor student. She had won academic and athletic scholarships to study marine biology at Florida State University and was scheduled to leave for school just two weeks after her death.
In remarks offered to the judge yesterday, her father, mother and younger brother described her as a free spirit who sometimes wore funny socks and hats and always brightened the lives of those she met. She loved nature and traveling and hoped to one day work with dolphins. And her death inspired her brother, Jeremiah, to become a police officer.
"Between her birth and her death, the world was a better place because Shen was here," Chuck Poehlman said. "She was my guiding spirit. I kind of followed her."
The prosecutor read a statement written by Shen's mother, Janice Dullea: "Our family has lived in a fog like a nightmare you can't wake up from. ... I sometimes wake in the middle of the night and forget that this has happened and then I realize Shen is gone. If Shen could be courageous, suffer and die, then I can be courageous, suffer and learn to live."
A jury convicted Miller in 2000 of sexually assaulting, robbing and killing the teenager at his Reisterstown apartment after hiring her to baby-sit his nephew for five hours. The job was simply a lure. There was no child for Shen Poehlman to watch.
Prosecutor Robin S. Coffin told the judge yesterday that Miller had made similar arrangements with another young woman for later in the afternoon on the day that Shen was killed.
But four years after Miller was convicted and sentenced to death, Maryland's highest court overturned that sentence. In a complex ruling, a minority of the seven judges on the Court of Appeals found that Miller should not only get a new sentencing hearing but also a new trial because of the testimony of a state witness who may have lied about not having a deal with prosecutors in his own case.
Concerned that the loose thread would continue to complicate the case - even if another jury sentenced Miller to death a second time - Baltimore County prosecutors struck a complex plea agreement with Miller in August 2007.
Under the arrangement, the judge granted Miller a new trial on the first-degree murder charge. Miller then pleaded guilty to that count, and prosecutors withdrew the notice of their intention to seek a death sentence.
