by Heather Schaefer - Daily News Staff - hschaefer@rhinelanderdailynews.com

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A Land O'Lakes man convicted of poisoning his wife and drowning her in a toilet bowl is taking his case to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

According to court records, Stephen Willet, an attorney for Douglas Plude, filed a petition for review with the supreme court on April 5.

The state supreme court has the right to accept or reject any request to have a case heard.

Plude, 40, is serving a life sentence (with a chance for parole in 20 years) after being convicted of the first degree intentional homicide of his wife, Genell, during the early morning hours of October 22, 1999.

During Plude's murder trial in December of 2002, prosecutors argued an angry, controlling Plude killed his wife, who had recently announced she was a lesbian, to keep her from leaving him to start a new life. Plude has always maintained his innocence and at trial his defense team argued Genell Plude's plan to leave her husband was a fantasy and she took her own life after realizing her dream relationship with a woman in Texas would never happen.

Following Plude's conviction, his defense team filed a motion for a new trial but in March the third circuit court of appeals in Wausau rejected the motion.

In a 2-1 vote, the court said one of the state's main witnesses, a purported expert on injury causation, had sufficient legitimate credentials that his testimony could be believed despite the fact that he was caught lying about being a professor at Temple University.

Shaibani was considered a key witness in the trial because his testimony directly contradicted Plude's testimony that he found his wife's head submerged in the toilet water. Shaibani demonstrated for the jury that an adult female the approximate size of Genell Plude could not have held her head in the water without the assistance of an outside force. Gravity, he said, would force the body off and away from the bowl.

Although it was clearly disturbed by the deception, the appeals court said the jury had a considerable amount of circumstantial evidence available and could have convicted Plude even without Shaibani's testimony.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Thomas Cane wrote that a new trial should be ordered because of the strong likelihood that the jury was swayed by Shaibani's false claims.

“We should not permit a conviction to stand when it rests in part on false testimony if there is a reasonable likelihood the false testimony influenced the jury in reaching its verdict,” Cane wrote.

The state supreme court, which has discretion over which appeals it will hear, receives approximately 1,000 petitions per year and accepts between 100 and 120 cases.

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