The prosecution wants a Fairfield man who murdered his wife, then told police she’d disappeared from a Walmart parking lot, to spend 55 years in prison for the crime.
The defense has recommended Luc Tieman, 34, be sentenced to 35 years.
Superior Court Justice Robert Mullen will sentence Tieman for killing his wife, Valerie Tieman, 34, in August 2016 on Friday morning at the Somerset County Courthouse in Skowhegan.
Tieman faces between 25 years and life in prison.
Before going to trial, Tieman rejected an offer to plead guilty to murder and serve 40 years behind bars, defense attorney Stephen Smith of Augusta said in his six-page sentencing memorandum.
The disabled veteran was found guilty April 9 of intentional or knowing murder by a jury after a week-long trial. Jurors deliberated for about 40 minutes before announcing they had reached a verdict.
Tieman took the stand in his own defense and delivered the closing argument himself. He denied killing his wife.
Valerie Tieman’s body was found Sept. 20, 2016, in a shallow grave on wooded property owned by Luc Tieman’s parents, according to trial testimony.
Buried with her were flowers, a Mason jar, a wedding band, an empty SweeTarts box, a bag of rippled potato chips, and love notes using Tieman’s and his wife’s pet names for each other. Under her body, police found a bottle of Gucci men’s cologne called Guilty, Assistant Attorney General Leane Zainea told the jury in her closing argument.
Zainea said in her 16-page sentencing memorandum that the aggravating factors in Tieman’s case far outweighed the mitigating ones. The prosecutor cited Tieman’s lack of remorse over his wife’s death and the number of times he changed his story in police interviews.
“Initially, the defendant claimed that Valerie left him in the Walmart parking lot,” Zainea said. “For days he perpetuated that lie to Valerie’s parent and brother, his own parents and to Valerie’s friends as they sought information about her whereabouts. The text messages and Facebook messages admitted at trial demonstrate the defendant’s callousness and absolute lack of acceptance of responsibility.”
That evidence showed that Tieman had a new girlfriend he planned to move in with.
Smith disagreed in his sentencing memorandum and argued for a 35-year sentence because that the mitigating factors outweighed the aggravated ones in Tieman’s case. The defense attorney pointed to Tieman’s military service that included two tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq and his lack of criminal history as reasons for the shorter sentence.
“A 35-year sentence is significantly higher than the 25-year minimum and will send the necessary signals to society that this crime is being harshly punished,” Smith wrote. “The sentence will also show the court’s willingness to take into account individual factors in murder sentencing.”
Tieman does not qualify for a life sentence due to a 1990 state Supreme Court decision, State of Maine v. John Shortsleeves, that laid out seven conditions under which a judge may send a defendant to prison for life.
They are: premeditation; murder accompanied by torture, sexual abuse or other extreme cruelty; murder committed in a penal institution by an inmate; multiple victims; murder of a hostage; a previous murder conviction; or the murder of an on-duty law enforcement officer.
One or more of them must exist for a convicted murderer to be sentenced to life. The prosecution and the defense agreed that it was not proven that the murder of Valerie Tieman was premeditated.
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