No new trial for Algonquin woman in murder-for-hire case
An Algonquin woman who was convicted of a murder-for-hire plot against her now ex-husband has failed in her bid to win a new trial.
A Kane County judge ruled that complaints Sherrieann Remsik-Miller had about her attorney were a matter of trial strategy, not ineffective representation.
Miller, 48, was convicted in summer 2010 and sentenced to 22 years in prison.
During her trial, Kane County prosecutors said Miller offered a homeless man $30,000 in spring 2008 to kill her husband. The man, who met Miller while she volunteered at an Elgin homeless shelter, went to police and recorded conversations in which Miller told the man to strap explosives to the bottom of her husband’s truck and also discussed the possibility of using a gun.
Miller represented herself during a hearing in Kane County this week before Judge Thomas Mueller, who presided over her bench trial. Miller argued that she did not take substantial steps toward the murder by meeting the man at Elgin Community College because she was a student there at the time.
Miller also argued that her defense attorney, John Paul Carroll, failed to investigate witnesses that testified against her and advised her not to take the stand in her own defense.
“We never discussed my testimony,” she said. “I depended on his opinion,” she said.
Carroll said he was not going to dispute that Miller’s voice was on the recording, but wanted to instead argue that she was “just talking” and had no intention of following through on harming her husband.
“As I stand here, I stand by that strategy,” Carroll said.
As for advising his client not to testify, Carroll said a prosecutor could have used Miller’s words on the tape against her on cross examination.
“I said, ‘I don’t know where this is going to go if you got on the stand.’ That was my advice. I didn’t want you (the judge) to catch her in any kind of lie,” Carroll told Mueller.
If Mueller ruled that Carroll did not provide effective representation, Miller could have had an appellate court defender appointed to argue for a new trial at a later date.
Miller currently is serving her sentence at the downstate Lincoln Correctional Center and has a projected parole date of May 2027, according to the Illinois Department of Corrections.