A month before Dane County Circuit Court Judge Jill Karofsky announced her candidacy for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, prosecutors begged her to keep a murderer in prison for life. Instead, she handed him the lightest sentence she could.
Last April, Jesse Faber's family pleaded with Karofsky to sentence Daniel Lieske to life in prison without the possibility of extended supervision. Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne, who personally prosecuted the case, pleaded with Karofsky to throw the book at him. Lieske, 61, had just been convicted of first degree intentional homicide and hiding a corpse in the death of the 21 year-old Faber in an apartment building in the town of Medina, shooting him six times at close range and then rolling Faber's body into a rug covered with plastic and driving it 30 miles to a storage unit in Rio that Lieske had rented.
So cold-hearted was Lieske that he was seen laughing and joking with friends just hours after the murder.
The crime shocked Dane County for its viciousness and its cold-bloodedness, but after Lieske was found guilty at trial, Judge Karofsky's sentence was even more shocking. In Wisconsin, a guilty verdict on a first degree intentional homicide charge carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison. The only discretion a judge has is whether to allow the defendant the chance to leave prison on extended supervision. Surely a crime this heinous and this obviously meticulously planned couldn't warrant such leniency, could it?
It did. Karofsky handed Lieske the most lenient sentence she could--life in prison with the possibility of extended supervision after 20 years. Her reasoning? Lieske would be 81.
"The last thing I'm going to say is this to Jesse's family," Karofsky said after issuing the sentence to a stunned courtroom. "I know some of you wanted the most maximum sentence in this case and were I sitting in your seat, I would want the exact same thing, too. You don't have to like this sentence or agree with this sentence. The reason behind my sentence is that Mr. Lieske would be 81 years old."
Karofsky also sentenced Lieske to 7.5 years in prison after Lieske pleaded guilty to hiding a corpse, but Karofsky decided to allow Lieske to serve that sentence concurrently with his sentence on the homicide charge. While Lieske could have spent a total of 27.5 years in prison before he would be eligible for release, Karofsky bent over backwards to get him out of prison as soon as she possibly could.
The Faber family was distraught and furious. The Dane County District Attorney's Office was outraged. Even the liberal Madison community was in shock over the most incomprehensibly lenient sentence a murderer had received in recent memory.
Just a few weeks later, Karofsky announced her candidacy for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.