The trial of Amanda Milsap, a Lafayette woman accused of bribing a witness in an alleged effort to derail a trial of her former husband, will not include evidence about how that suspected plot extended to the shooting of a Tippecanoe County judge, a deputy prosecutor told a judge Friday.
Milsap’s attorney, Earl McCoy, argued during a pretrial hearing Friday that she had been lumped into media coverage about the Jan. 18 attempted murder of Tippecanoe Superior Court 2 Judge Steve Meyer and his wife, Kim Meyer.
McCoy argued that potential jurors from Tippecanoe County, given high-profile coverage locally, likely would have a difficult time by an April 8 trial date of making a distinction between what Milsap is accused of doing – “Limited to basically a phone call that either happened or didn’t happen,” he said – and charges against five others in what investigators say followed weeks later and led to the shooting of the Meyers at their Lafayette home.
A decision on a change of venue request, either moving the trial outside Tippecanoe County or bringing jurors from another county, will come in the next few weeks, Cass County Superior Court 2 Judge Lisa Swaim – appointed to oversee six cases tied in some way to the alleged plot – said Friday.
