I feel like Pinocchio must have when he declared, “I’m a real boy!”
I sat in on the last day of my first major trial Friday. I was covering the Albert Sterling murder-for-hire trial for my regular job and got to hear the penalty hearing and closing arguments.
Aside from the obvious rule of “Don’t take the stand in your own defense,” the other shocker that stood out to everyone was the guy’s wife taking the stand to plead for mercy from the jury when they decided on a sentence.
Now if you think that’s strange, you aren’t familiar with the case.
It’s OK. Who wants to watch the news or read a newspaper? (Fewer and fewer each day, the experts say.)
To catch you up with Cliff Notes: Sterling led a double life as an engineer for AT&T and an instructor at a gym. He had an affair and later tried to hire a guy to kill his pregnant wife.
Did you catch that?
His wife.
The one who testified on his behalf so he would get probation instead of going to jail for a long time.
Maybe it’s this time of year that got me thinking about love. Or maybe it’s the irony of a woman begging for her husband’s freedom after he had been convicted of trying to have her and his unborn child killed.
But one thing kept bugging me: How do you measure love?
Is it a kiss in the morning?
Is it a glance to someone you can barely talk to without tripping over your tongue?
Is it the continuing of a relationship despite the monotony of the day-to-day routine?
Is it noticing a look in your other half’s eye that takes you back to the second date, week, or decade you were together?
I know what it is for me and I have no clue what it is for my wife or anyone else.
I certainly can’t begin to explain it for Roxanne Johnson-Sterling.
Love is fickle and couples fall in and out of love everyday. Sometimes it’s for good reasons, but often there are needless breakups topped off with pointless emotional pain.
Sterling claimed he did not try to have someone kill his wife and now 13-month-old son. He said he was trying to have her car stolen for the insurance money.
The prosecuting attorney said Sterling was simply a con artist who got caught in his lies. Using a picture of the young couple with their first son the defense had on an overhead projector, he covered Roxanne’s face with a scrap of paper and claimed that was what Albert wanted.
I’ve been married 16 years and from my own experience I can say no one knows anyone better than a spouse. But how can anyone truly know anyone thoroughly and completely? And how can people outside the relationship truly know what went on in their relationship?
Perhaps he was a cheater and, yes, he has been convicted of solicitation of capital murder. But for a woman to plea for her husband as she did for more than a year means to me that she still loves him.
Maybe it’s more for her sons to have their father than her to have her husband.
Maybe it’s simply blind devotion to someone who would have harmed her after he charmed her. Who knows?
But ask yourself: Could you love someone that much?
On Monday morning, a Collin County jury sentenced Albert Jackson Sterling II to two concurrent 30-year prison terms for soliciting the murder of his wife and their unborn son.