Empty Promises

reporter to read aloud. Some of the jurors avoided looking at the defendant, but several stared directly at him as the verdicts were read aloud.
    Steven Sherer was found guilty on both counts: guilty of first-degree premeditated murder and guilty of second-degree felony murder. He seemed shocked initially, but he turned toward the jurors and shouted across the courtroom, “How do you go to prison for something you didn’t do? When Jami comes back, you can all rot in hell!”
    The jurors were quickly escorted from the courtroom and down the back stairs where no one could approach them. “It had been so long,” one recalled. “And it was over so shockingly. One of the men told me that he went to the transit station across the street and just caught the first bus going north. He didn’t even care if it was the right bus. He wanted to get out of there.”
    The jurors didn’t know about Steve’s next outburst until they read it in the newspaper. As he was being led out of the courtroom by corrections officers, Steve turned toward Judy Hagel, his face contorted with rage. “Fuck you, Judy!” he roared.
    If the jury had any doubt that they had done the right thing, their first look at the anger Steve Sherer was capable of erased that doubt. They had now seen the man that tiny Jami Sherer knew all too well, seen the rage she had encountered perhaps in the last moments of her life. One of the jurors—who had been the single holdout—was almost relieved at the sight of Steve’s ferocious temper. “Now, I know,” he said, “that my decision was the right one.”
    Another said, “It would have been almost criminal if we had not come back with a first-degree verdict of guilty.”
    On July 22, Steve appeared for sentencing. Mair and Camiel had sent Judge Wartnik a defense-sentencing memo that somehow made domestic violence seem prosaic. In part, it read, “Inasmuch as domestic violence is a pervasive societal illness and is common in the United States (one need only look to the amount of men and women in our local jails currently on charges associated with domestic violence), it is not a crime of the unfettered exercise of free will and choice.”
    Reading this excerpt carefully, one can deduce that the defense now maintained that their client wasn’t really responsible for the actions that resulted in Jami’s death because almost everyone was committing domestic violence. Pete Mair insisted there was nothing exceptional about Sherer’s alleged crimes that would call for a sentence higher than the standard range of up to thirty years for a murder that occurs during spousal abuse.
    In the bright-red jail coveralls worn by King County’s most dangerous felons, Steve Sherer pleaded with the judge, “Your Honor, I stand here before you found guilty of a crime I did not commit. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I’m not a murderer. I did not murder my wife. I had nothing to do with it.”
    Wartnik was not impressed, apparently, with this argument. Anthony Wartnik looked directly at Steve Sherer as he prepared to hand down the sentence. He said he was concerned about the lasting scars that Chris Sherer, now twelve, would suffer throughout his life because of the loss of his mother and the knowledge that his father had killed her.
    Moreover, in the judge’s opinion, it had taken methodical planning for Sherer to murder his wife and to pull off the “cruel hoax” that had only served to prolong her family’s suffering, as they spent a decade without knowing where Jami was or how she had died. “A crime that would be a perfect crime doesn’t happen by luck or chance,” he said to Sherer. “It requires cunning planning and calculation.
    “I have great fear not only for the women who may get involved with Mr. Sherer in the future … but for the safety of Jami’s friends and relatives and the other witnesses in this case,” Judge Wartnik added, referring to Steve’s reputation for exacting vengeance.
    One of the most convincing witnesses who appeared before the jurors was Karil Klingbeil, director of social work at Harborview Medical Center and an expert on domestic violence. Although the jury didn’t know it, Klingbeil had lost her own sister to homicide at the hands of Mitchell Rupe, a bank robber who shot two female tellers in an Olympia, Washington, bank many years ago. A dynamic and brilliant woman, Klingbeil strives to protect women caught in relationships where they are denigrated and