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Claudia Hoerig’s sentence could be life in prison
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
People who have watched the saga of Claudia Hoerig, who goes on trial Monday in the 2007 aggravated murder of her pilot-husband, can be understandably confused by the terminology associated with her extradition from Brazil to the United States a year ago.
Hoerig, 54, who is accused of killing Maj. Karl Hoerig in their Newton Falls home, was born in Brazil and has been called a Brazilian national, which means a Brazilian citizen.
She’s also been called a “naturalized” U.S. citizen, which is someone who has sworn an oath of allegiance to the United States and took other steps necessary to become a U.S. citizen. In 1999, Claudia Hoerig did that, renouncing her Brazilian citizenship, Trumbull County prosecutors have said.
The terms “national” and “citizen” were used a great deal when county Prosecutor Dennis Watkins was attempting to have Hoerig extradited back to the U.S. for more than a decade to face trial.
Initially, Brazil refused to send her back, saying the Brazilian constitution does not allow extradition of Brazilian nationals to face criminal charges in other countries.
Brazil’s constitution says “no Brazilian shall be extradited,” except “naturalized ones” charged with a crime committed “before naturalization, or in the case there is sufficient evidence of participation in the illicit traffic of narcotics and related drugs.”
That left Claudia free to live in Brazil for about a decade until Watkins and U.S. officials made headway in arguing she is no longer a Brazilian citizen because she renounced her Brazilian citizenship while living in the United States.
In 2016, the Brazilian Supreme Court stripped Claudia of her Brazilian citizenship, and she was arrested. It took more than a year for the Brazilian government to allow American officials to go get her and bring her back to Ohio.
The confession
Documents filed by prosecutors in advance of trial say Hoerig confessed last January she killed her husband. On Jan. 17, as federal marshals flew her back to the U.S. from Brazil, Hoerig began engaging two agents in “general conversation” that led to a remark that: “A wife does not kill her husband without a good reason,” a document from the U.S. Marshal’s Service says.
She went on to say she “suffered from mental and sexual abuse” at the hands of her husband. She told the marshals on the airplane she was about to kill herself the day of Karl’s murder, but she killed him instead out of anger.
She then tried to kill herself using a wooden device designed to hold a gun, which was mounted in a bedroom closet – but the gun would not fire, she said. The report says on the day of her husband’s death, she told him she was pregnant, and they argued. She said she stood in the hallway of their home and threatened to shoot herself.
Claudia told the marshals her husband told her to do it in the basement “so she didn’t get blood on the paintings and carpet.”
“Hoerig stated Karl started to walk down the stairs and that she was so angry that she shot him. She said she shot him three times, and she was sure he was dead,” the report says.
She claims she lost the baby.
No Brazil trial
In 2010, when the prospects of extradition seemed far off, the Brazilian government offered to put Hoerig on trial in Brazil.
Watkins objected because a Brazilian prosecutor would handle the case under Brazilian law, conviction would result in an “automatic retrial,” and the cost to Trumbull County to take witnesses, law-enforcement officials and others to Brazil would have been astronomical.
The most severe penalty she could have gotten would have been 30 years in prison, not a life sentence, Watkins said. Watkins and others involved in the case cannot talk about the case outside of court because of a gag order Judge Andrew Logan of common pleas court imposed in February.
But it is believed Watkins thinks Hoerig should face whatever penalty an Ohio judge deems appropriate, including life in prison without parole.
Even before the gag order was imposed, assistant Prosecutor Chris Becker declined to talk about the penalty Hoerig faced if convicted in the case.
But Warren criminal defense attorney Jeff Goodman said the aggravated-murder charge Hoerig faces carries a possible penalty of life in prison without the possibility of parole, though not the death penalty.
An Ohio aggravated-murder conviction can result in other life prison sentences, such as life in prison with parole eligibility after 20, 25 or 30 years, Goodman said.
Under a plea agreement or other circumstances, she could be found guilty of lesser offenses that would not carry a life prison sentence.
Also notable
Goodman noted Brazil is not the only country that refuses to extradite people to face criminal charges in other countries.
For example, film director Roman Polanski left the United States in 1978 after being convicted of statutory rape of a child and has never been forced to return to the United States to receive his punishment, according to The New York Times.
The Supreme Court in Poland in 2016 rejected the Polish government’s request for Polanski to be extradited. Polanski was a dual citizen of Poland and France, which does not extradite its citizens, the newspaper said in 2016.
In October 2015, a judge in Krakow, Poland, ruled that turning over Polanski would be an “obviously unlawful” deprivation of liberty, saying California, where the crime occurred, was unlikely to conduct a fair trial and provide humane conditions of confinement for Polanski, who was 82 at the time.