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The discovery that one of the prosecution’s expert witnesses lied under oath about his credentials is enough to undermine Douglas Plude’s first-degree murder conviction, the court said. Jurors might have doubted his guilt had they known the witness lied about being a professor at Temple University, it said.
Plude, who is imprisoned at the Waupun Correctional Institution, “was very emotional and elated beyond words” when he learned of the decision, said his lawyer, Stephen Willett.
“He has professed his innocence from day one and so he feels vindicated,” he said.
Prosecutors had no immediate comment on whether they would retry Plude.
The 41-year-old man was convicted of first-degree intentional homicide in the 1999 death of Genell Plude. He was sentenced to life in prison in 2003.
Genell Plude, 28, was found dead with her head and face in a toilet bowl in the Land O’Lakes home they shared with Plude’s mother. The two were having marital problems at the time, and Genell Plude was planning to move to Minnesota with her mother the day she died.
Prosecutors contended Plude murdered his wife by poisoning her with a migraine headache drug and pushing her face into the toilet to drown her while she vomited. Plude argued that she committed suicide by taking an overdose of drugs, drowning after her lungs filled with her own body fluid.
He said he found his wife slumped over a toilet filled with vomit and then tried to perform CPR to keep her alive.
Medical experts who testified were divided over whether her death was a homicide or suicide. The emergency room doctor who treated Genell Plude said she drowned because of fluid in her lungs but could not say where it came from.
An Illinois medical examiner testified she drowned after the drugs in her body slowed her heart rate and circulation, which caused fluid to accumulate in her lungs. The pathologist who performed her autopsy said he could not determine what happened.
Perhaps the state’s most important witness was Saami Shaibani, who described himself as an expert in “injury mechanism analysis” and a clinical associate professor at Temple University. He is not a medical doctor but told jurors that he taught physicians and surgeons about injury at Temple.
Shaibani testified that Genell Plude’s body could not have been found in the positions that her husband described and that her face could not have submerged in the toilet bowl without someone forcing it under the water. The testimony undercut Plude’s defense and strengthened the prosecution’s theory.
After he was convicted, Plude discovered that Shaibani had lied on the witness stand about his relationship with Temple and asked for a new trial.
A circuit court judge and an appeals court both upheld the conviction, saying Shaibani’s false statements about his credentials did not make his expert opinions unreliable. The appeals court noted Shaibani had a doctorate in material physics from Oxford University and a patent relating to his method and system for diagnosing traumatic injuries.
But all seven Supreme Court justices agreed Plude deserved a new trial.
“There exists a reasonable probability that, had the jury discovered that Shaibani lied about his credentials, it would have had a reasonable doubt as to Plude’s guilt,” Justice Patience Roggensack wrote in an opinion joined by four other justices. Justices Louis Butler and Annette Ziegler agreed but wrote separate opinions.
Vilas County District Attorney Al Moustakis, whose office prosecuted Plude, was out of town Tuesday on business. An aide said he would have no comment until next week.
Willett said he hopes prosecutors decide to drop the case. If they don’t, he said he would ask for his client’s release on bond until the second trial.
The Department of Justice, which represented prosecutors in the appeal, acknowledged Shaibani embellished his credentials but said those statements did not change the case’s outcome. The department has no comment on the decision, spokesman Bill Cosh said.
