"Kill the bastard. Somebody has to if I can't."
It's been a decade since those words flashed across Charles Poehlman's mind. He's in a better place now, he says, anger replaced by acceptance. He still wants the man who killed his 17-year-old daughter to die, but he's come to terms with the fact that the state of Maryland won't execute John A. Miller IV.
But neither Poehlman nor Miller feels justice has been done.
Poehlman believes Miller finagled a system that coddles criminals to draw out proceedings and escape the death penalty. Miller feels wronged by a system once intent on killing him, and says in court papers that his life-without-parole sentence — to which he readily agreed to avoid lethal injection — is no longer acceptable.
The victim's relatives are trying to move on 13 years after the death of Shen Poehlman, an honors student, prom queen and tennis star at Liberty High School in Carroll County. Miller lured her to his Reisterstown apartment under the pretense of babysitting his nephew in the summer of 1998.
He sexually assaulted and strangled Shen with a belt two weeks before she was to head to Florida State University on an academic and athletic scholarship. She planned to major in marine biology.
Miller continues to fight, even though his appeals for a new trial and new sentencing have been repeatedly rebuffed. Last week, he filed another proceeding, this time in federal court, challenging the terms of his incarceration.
He's arguing that the state kept him on death row for four years after Maryland's highest court vacated his death sentence in 2004 and ordered a new trial. The Court of Appeals ruled that a key witness had lied in 2000 by denying he had worked a deal with prosecutors for leniency in his own criminal case.
Miller argues in his lawsuit that his confinement at the Supermax prison in Baltimore caused him "irreparable harm" because of restrictive conditions and limited medical benefits. He is seeking more than $2.5 million.
The members of the Poehlman family see this as another insult. They repeatedly thought the case had ended — only to end up back in a courtroom, a place they hoped to avoid after acquiescing to prosecutors who didn't want to push for the death penalty after a retrial was ordered in 2004.
It wasn't the ending the Poehlmans had wanted. But it was an ending, so they signed off on the deal: Miller would plead guilty and serve life in prison without the chance of parole.
Miller followed through and pleaded guilty but then had second thoughts before the judge could impose the sentence. He filed appeal after appeal, dragging the case out another four years. He claimed that his lawyers coerced him to plead guilty. Then he sought a new trial altogether. Then he filed a motion to withdraw his guilty plea.
After Miller had exhausted all his challenges, a judge, finally, on Nov. 17, 2008, imposed the life-without-parole sentence to which Miller had agreed to four years earlier. And now, Miller is back again with a new grievance, and the Poehlmans are forced to confront the case once again.
"I can tell you that Mr. Poehlman has gone through an amazing process — through extreme anger early on to a really much healthier place for himself and the loss of his daughter," Baltimore County Assistant State's Attorney Robin S. Coffin, who helped prosecute the case, told me last week.
The prosecutor said the case would have been protracted no matter what plea deal was offered. "If it hadn't been death, we would've fought tooth and nail over life without parole," she said. After the death penalty came off the table, "we went to him with life without parole. He took it and very quickly had buyer's remorse."
Coffin added: "Who said the justice system was easy?"
The Poehlmans have struggled to move on. The victim's brother, Jeremiah, who was a teenager at the time of the killing, is now a police officer in Howard County. Coffin said the girl's mother remains "tortured by her daughter's death, and nothing we do to John Miller will change that."
Charles Poehlman — who described the jury ruling for the death penalty as "like a touchdown" — has come to terms with what has happened, but still wants Miller to die.
Miller "wants to get out," Poehlman said of the latest court challenge. "He wants to be able to walk as a free man, and he'll do whatever it takes to do that. He's clinging to that hope. … He doesn't want to face the truth that he will be in prison for the rest of his life.
"I have let go of my anger. … This thing that he's doing is more mental gymnastics for me. It doesn't upset me. I'm not at that forgiving stage, by any stretch of the imagination, and I do support the death penalty, and I would like to see his life end. I would look forward to him being off the face of this earth."
Had Miller's sentence not been overturned, he would've joined others in legal limbo — the same court that vacated his penalty in 2004 ruled two years later that Maryland's lethal injection protocol needs to be redrawn. The ruling created a de facto moratorium on state executions that remains to this day. There are five people on death row; including one who has been there for 25 years.
When Miller got off death row, state officials said that they would keep him in isolation at Supermax, a prison that until this year held the worst of the worst state offenders. Miller, who is now being held in a state prison in Cumberland, claims in his lawsuit that he was illegally kept on death row until May 2008.
Among his complaints, Miller said he was denied medical care given other inmates, such as physical therapy for an injured back and fillings for his cavities. He claims in his suit that death row inmates have bad teeth pulled, instead of repaired, and that by the time he was moved to Cumberland, half his teeth were missing. He also says he was denied visits from family, forbidden from participating in Catholic Mass and barred from prison jobs and training programs.
Mark A. Vernarelli, a spokesman for the state prison system, said officials had not yet studied Miller's lawsuit and had no comment on it. He also wouldn't discuss the treatment of death row inmates and others in the general population. Inmates at Supermax, even those not on death row, were confined to small cells with tiny windows and held in isolation 23 hours a day, according to news accounts.
Miller's suit may be ruled frivolous, and thrown out, and it certainly won't attract much sympathy. Poehlman views it as another maneuver to game a system.
"Why the system would cater to that, I don't know," Poehlman said. "Trickery and deception, that's how he got Shen up to his apartment, by lying to her, by playing off her goodness. He's playing off the goodness of our society. How far this goes, I'm not sure."