Support for this edition comes from the Lafayette Symphony Orchestra, presenting AuthocthonoUS: Stories of WE the People featuring works by William Grant Still and Leonard Bernstein. The concert takes place at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 26, the Long Center for the Performing Arts. For more information or to purchase tickets visit the LSO website or call the LSO office at 765-742-6463.
MILSAP LAYS OUT APPEAL OF BRIBERY CONVICTION
An attorney for Amanda Milsap, a Lafayette mental health therapist convicted in April of attempting to bribe the victim in a domestic violence and gun possession case against her former husband to get her to not testify in his trial, argued in a new court filing that her conviction and six-year sentence should be tossed.
Milsap filed an appeal in May of her conviction, based on charges loosely connected to an extended plot that led to the Jan. 18 attempted murder of a Tippecanoe County judge.
In a brief filed Sept. 16 with the Indiana Court of Appeals, Milsap laid out why she’s asking to vacate the convictions and dismiss all charges. Short of that, the appeal challenges the aggravated sentence, saying it wasn’t warranted and should be reduced to the minimum for each count, leaving her with a total sentence of one year, fully suspended to probation.
A jury found Milsap guilty of charges that she conveyed a $10,000 offer from the Vice Lords gang to a victim to not appear or testify in a January trial of Thomas Moss, her former husband.
Special Judge Lisa Swaim, a Cass County Superior Court judge assigned to her case, gave Milsap a maximum, six-year sentence, including three years in prison.
In the new court filing, Milsap’s attorney, Early McCoy, wrote that Milsap was charged after the victim scheduled to testify an upcoming trial for Thomas Moss contacted Lafayette police after hearing that Tippecanoe Superior Court 2 Judge Steve Meyer and his wife, Kim, had been shot through the front door of their Lafayette home by a masked man. The victim, already concerned because the shooting was two days ahead from Moss’ trial on 2024 domestic violence and gun charges in Meyer’s court, reported that she’d had a similar situation with someone coming to her door in Pennsylvania a week earlier.
When reporting that, according to the appeal, the victim also told Lafayette police she’d been contacted by Milsap a couple of weeks earlier, saying that “Milsap informed her that the Vice Lords wanted to pay (her) $10,000 in exchange for (her) agreeing not to testify in Moss’s upcoming jury trial.”
Investigators later charged Moss and three other alleged co-conspirators of deploying a plot that included the attempted murder of the judge and going to the victim’s home with plans to kill her, all in a suspected plan to sidetrack his trial.
Before the alleged plot escalated to that point, Milsap was accused of playing a role in trying to silence the victim in Moss’ trial.
