Since his death sentence was overturned, John A. Miller IV has accused his attorneys of coercion, deceit and of tricking him into pleading guilty to the murder of a 17-year-old girl.
Most recently, he attacked the very foundation of the legal argument that won him the right to a new trial and the plea agreement that spared him a return to death row.
Yesterday, a Baltimore County judge postponed Miller's sentencing again - but warned him against using complaints about his lawyers simply to delay the case.
"The court is not going to allow that kind of game-playing to take place, if it is game-playing," Circuit Judge Lawrence R. Daniels said.
It marked the second time in five months that Miller's sentencing has been delayed to allow him to find an attorney to litigate motions that accuse the public defenders representing him of wrongdoing.
The judge told the lawyers - Jerri Peyton-Braden and Hossein R. Parvizian - that he might eventually require them to leave the case.
"It appears to me that Mr. Miller may be using your representation as a method of delaying sentencing," Daniels told the defense attorneys.
Miller, 35, was sentenced to death in 2000 for the 1998 sexual assault and killing of Shen Poehlman, an honors student, tennis champion and prom queen at Liberty High School in Carroll County. But four years later, Maryland's highest court overturned the sentence and granted him a new sentencing hearing.
Mark Poehlman, the victim's uncle, said the family was disappointed and discouraged by the continued delays.
"It's unfortunate - the way the criminals can manipulate the system and how in the family, we all have to deal with this on an indefinite basis," he said after attending the hearing. "It's a ploy for him just to wear us down."
After one resentencing hearing date after another was postponed, prosecutors finally reached a complicated plea agreement with Miller in August that spared him the death penalty but also stripped him of all but a few extremely limited rights to appeal the new murder conviction.
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.
But since then, Miller has on his own, without help of the defense attorneys who brokered that plea agreement, filed one motion after another to undo it.
First, Miller said his lawyers "tricked him" into accepting a plea offer that could result in a sentence of life without parole. "I will not speak with Jerri or Hossein again," he wrote in his request to the judge to withdraw the plea, "because in my opinion they have now tried to take my life, as Life Without Parole with no appeals is totally unacceptable to me."
After a hearing - at which Miller was represented by a new attorney who agreed to handle just that hearing at no charge - Daniels denied the request.
Then, on March 6, with his new sentencing hearing just 11 days away, Miller filed a new legal motion asking the judge to reverse his decision to grant a new trial - the ruling that formed the basis for the plea agreement.
Miller argued in his court filing that the decision to grant him a new trial "should be nul [sic] and void on its face" because his attorneys failed to present any new evidence that would merit a new trial.
In a subsequent, rambling court filing riddled with incomplete sentences, Miller wrote that he "had absolutely no idea either before or now that granting of a new trial was premised on any waiver of any future arguments" - particularly regarding the testimony of a state witness who may have lied about not having a deal with prosecutors.
When the Maryland Court of Appeals granted Miller a new sentencing in 2004, three of the court's seven judges indicated that Miller should get not only a new sentencing but also a new trial because of that witness' testimony.
More than a dozen members of the Poehlman family attended yesterday's hearing with the hope that it would be their last in a case that has stretched on for nearly a decade.
Chuck Poehlman, the victim's father, angrily confronted the two top public defenders for Baltimore County as they filed out of the courtroom.
"What's so funny?" he asked. "It's like a joke to you, isn't it? It's not funny."
When deputy district public defender Donald E. Zaremba tried to assure Poehlman that he had not been smiling and did not find the matter amusing, another relative put up a hand in the defense attorney's face.
If the plea agreement remains intact, prosecutors will seek a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Miller has told the judge that he's seeking a life sentence with all but 40 to 60 years suspended, according to court documents.
jennifer.mcmenamin@ baltsun.com