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LaPorte County, Indiana, deputy prosecutor Jennifer Evans, who had just been elected to the county's Superior Court, was acquitted of attempted obstruction of justice and later suspended without pay for 60 days after asking an officer to destroy a note tied to a gunshot wound at her home.

Evans, 34, suffered a gunshot wound to the scalp around 11:30 p.m. on Dec. 22, 2008, when her 9mm handgun discharged, according to Indiana Supreme Court records. She told responding officers the shooting was an accident, and doctors treated her for a wound they said likely caused a concussion.

At the hospital, she gave Sgt. Paul Brettin and Capt. Clyde Crass of the LaPorte City Police Department a different account. She said she and her husband, Stephan, had been drinking and arguing that night, and that she had grabbed the gun to make him think she was considering suicide, not realizing it was loaded.

While LaPorte County Sheriff's Sgt. Patrick Cicero photographed her injury, Evans told him privately she had written her husband a note before the shooting, had not mentioned it to other investigators, and asked him to "get rid of it," saying she was embarrassed by its contents. Officers later found the note in a bedroom closet under a search warrant, court records show.

A LaPorte County grand jury indicted Evans in May 2009 on a Class D felony count of attempted obstruction of justice. The Indiana Supreme Court suspended her with pay days later, and her trial was eventually moved to Lake Circuit Court on a change of venue. A jury acquitted Evans of the felony charge on Jan. 5, 2010.

She still faced a judicial ethics case over the note, and admitted that asking Sgt. Cicero to dispose of it violated the code of judicial conduct. The Indiana Supreme Court, which by then listed her as Jennifer L. Koethe, suspended her without pay for 60 days beginning in March 2010, citing her head injury, cooperation and remorse as mitigating factors. She was ordered into therapy, barred for a year from hearing any case involving the officers who investigated her, and was automatically reinstated to the bench that May.