The Shawano-Menominee County District Attorney’s office sought to sanction the two attorneys representing Michael Ingold in a first-degree homicide case for withholding documents, but officials quickly withdrew the motion once it was discovered the document in question was already in the DA’s possession.
Ingold has been charged in the 2022 death of his girlfriend, Sheila Laudon. Ingold, who faces life in prison if convicted, has been in the county jail since July 2022 on a $1 million cash bond.
Albert Moustakis, one of Ingold’s attorneys, said in a hearing Feb. 27 that the state sought to deny expert testimony from Michigan medical expert Dr. Carl Schmidt regarding slides with DNA samples. Moustakis said he had sent a letter responding to the state’s request for a report from Schmidt, saying that there wasn’t a new report and that Schmidt’s last report was submitted to the court by previous legal counsel Julianne Lennon, who withdrew from the case in November 2024.
“I don’t know where the state thinks that we should be sanctioned by not allowing him to testify because they didn’t receive notice about what he was going to testify about,” Moustakis said. “They received notice about that from attorney Lennon. The notice we sent to them came later, but it isn’t really much different from what attorney Lennon had sent them, and frankly, he’s testified at a hearing. They’ve had plenty of notice about what he’s going to testify about. The motion, I think, is rather frivolous.”
Assistant District Attorney Laura Nelson said Moustakis was “mistaken” and denied that she didn’t want Schmidt to testify on what he’d already spoken about at a Daubert hearing. Nelson said her concern was about a “subsequent report” via a three-page document that Ingold passed to a third party during a hearing Jan. 13 and received back.
Nelson said a review of phone calls Ingold has received at the Shawano County Jail shows one caller was asked if he’d seen the portion of the document addressing the victim’s heart, liver and lungs.
“It appears that there is some sort of written report that the defendant has provided to outside entities,” Nelson said. “We don’t have any such report. It has not been provided to us in discovery.”
Moustakis and Kelli Sue Thompson, the other attorney currently representing Ingold, both denied having such a report.
“The state is speculating here,” Moustakis said. “They’re trying to infer that a document that was passed by Mr. Ingold to a third party — one that I’m not aware of — is a report from an expert. If we had a report from an expert, it would have been provided. There is no report from Mr. Schmidt.”
Moustakis speculated that the document in question was the autopsy report.
“I don’t think the state should be surprised by any of the information,” he said. “There’s no report to be provided. He’s going to base his opinions on the evidence the state has provided. He certainly didn’t go and exhume the body to examine it again. That would be out of the ordinary. The court and everybody would have known about it, because the court would have ordered it.”
Nelson wanted to see some kind of summary about the points that Schmidt would bring up in his testimony, saying the state is entitled to supplementary information from the defense.
“If his conclusions are evolving, then the state has a right, under the statute, for that, as well,” Nelson said.
Prior to a break in the hearing, Thompson received a document from someone in the gallery and revealed that the document was listed as 297 in the court exhibits, the one that had been passed around at the Jan. 13 hearing.
After the break, Nelson withdrew her motion to sanction Moustakis and Thompson.
At the Feb. 27 hearing, attorneys discussed the jury questionnaire and the setup for the trial, which is scheduled to start April 7. The 23-question questionnaire for potential jurors was pared down to 15, taking out questions like what type of television programs jurors watched, gauging whether they gravitated toward crime shows.
The jury trial is currently scheduled to last almost four weeks.
lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com
Shawano-Menominee Circuit Court Judge William Kussel Jr. looks over a document during a Feb. 27 hearing in the case of Michael Ingold. (Lee Pulaski | NEW Media)
