Despite the cries of locals, the conviction of Jerome Jay Ersland for the murder of 16-year-old Antwun “Speedy” Parker following the attempted robbery of a pharmacy seemed the proper result.  But conviction for murder does not, by some weird definition, demand the max.

A judge Monday refused to cut any time off the life term of a pharmacist convicted of murder for fatally shooting a robber.

“It’s injustice of a monumental proportion,” Jerome Jay Ersland, 59, said after his formal sentencing.

His lead defense attorney, Irven Box, asked that Ersland be given probation for life. Oklahoma County District Judge Ray C. Elliott refused, saying he saw no reason to suspend any of the sentence.

Ersland may have intentionally caused the death of Parker without legal justification, but it’s not as if he roamed the streets of Oklahoma City in search of a teenager to murder, or was prepared to kill another human being in the course of a robbery, putting his financial interests above the life of another.  He may have been very, very wrong, but in the scheme of murders, it can get far, far worse. 

While I’m unfamiliar with the specifics of the Oklahoma sentencing regimen for murder, there appears to be ample room to take into account both the nature of the crime as well as the nature of the criminal.  If the judge saw no reason to suspend any of the sentence, then he had his eyes closed tight.  The reasons are clear.

There are people who murder children for fun, for nothing, out of unexplainable random hatred and cruelty.  Save the most severe sentence for them.  Distinguish the undisputed fact that this murder, and murder it was, came about because Parker and his cohort came into Ersland’s pharmacy with a gun to rob it, and he defended but went too far.  Ersland was wrong, but not so wrong, so evil in his failure to stop when the threat ended, that his conduct demanded that he die in prison.

And what of the man before the court?

Ersland was known as a hard worker at the pharmacy and was well liked by most customers there. Twice divorced, he lived in Chickasha with a pet dog he named after Winston Churchill, the British leader during World War II.

He played music for a church in Chickasha and collected guns for a hobby. He served in both the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force and had never been arrested before the robbery.

The case revealed he also had a deceptive side. His first account of the shooting was contradicted by recordings from the drugstore’s security cameras. His claim to police and others of being in combat in Iraq during the first Gulf War was contradicted by his military records.

His claim of having a broken inoperable back was contradicted by X-rays taken at the jail.

While no mention is made of any consideration of Ersland’s mental state, everything about this case smacks of some degree of mental illness.  Not enough to render him incompetent to stand trial, but sufficient to suggest he functioned with diminished capacity for the purpose of mitigating his blameworthiness.

Often, a defendant doesn’t want to assert that he suffers from any psychological impairment.  He wants to be a normal, even a hero, and the suggestion that there’s something awry in his brain is so patently offensive that he refuses to allow it to be ascertained or argued.  Maybe his lawyer didn’t see it.  Clearly, the judge didn’t.

But this brief history has all the hallmarks of something very wrong happening in his thought processes.  Even if Ersland was against it, his lawyer should have, at minimum, had him evaluated to determine his competency to make the decision to refuse to raise it as an argument, to determine whether there was something that might save him from dying in prison.  Whatever ego, if that was the problem, stopped Ersland from ascertaining whether he was impaired will dissipate in the quiet of his prison cell, where he will spend the rest of his life.

People have a very difficult time distinguishing between the validity of a guilty verdict, especially for a crime as serious as murder, and the need to impose a disproportionately harsh sentence.  Heck, people are all too happy to urge the death penalty for jaywalking, every criminal being inherently unworthy of the level of thought and consideration necessary to impose a sentence no more harsh than is necessary to serve the legitimate purposes of sentence.

That the wailing of locals that Ersland should not have been convicted of the murder of Parker may have pushed the judge to be less feeling, less caring, less thoughtful, is wrong as well.  The judge may have viewed his sentence as a means of showing support for the verdict, his approval of the efforts of the jury that reached this unpopular conviction.  If so, then the court abused its power.  Sentences aren’t tools to react to public outrage, whether it’s for or against a verdict.  Sending a message only related to the deterrent effect of a sentence, not to some extraneous political statement.

At 59, Ersland has many years of life ahead of him.  Whether the popular cries will push the governor to commute his sentence is hardly clear, and hardly a given.  Popular outrage will die down as people get back to caring about the things that truly matter, themselves.  The governor may act if he see votes in support of a re-election effort, of not to curry favor with tough-on-crime proponents or the police.  Depending on a politician to take a principled stand is risky business.

Yet Jerome Ersland, the murderer, deserves a sentence appropriate to the crime and the criminal.  It appears he got neither.