Jury awards woman $34 million for wrongful conviction

Kirstin Blaise Lobato, who spent nearly 16 years in prison for a killing she did not commit, was awarded more than $34 million by a federal jury in Nevada on Thursday.

Lobato had sued the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and two detectives, who the suit said misrepresented her statements and ignored evidence that proved her innocence.

After the civil verdict was announced, Lobato repeatedly hugged her lawyers outside the courtroom and told reporters that her search for justice had been an “uphill battle,” the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.

“I have no idea what the rest of my life is going to look like,” Lobato told reporters. “All I know is what the past has looked like, and it was pretty bad.”

Lobato’s lawyers said that the jury’s verdict brought an end to an ordeal that began when she was 18 and arrested in the killing of Duran Bailey, 44, who was found dead on the west side of Las Vegas on July 8, 2001.

Bailey had been badly beaten and stabbed, and his body had been mutilated, the lawsuit said. His penis had been severed, and his body had been covered with trash. Two detectives, Thomas Thowsen and James LaRochelle, linked Lobato to the killing after they were told that she had defended herself when a man tried to rape her in the parking lot of a hotel in east Las Vegas, the lawsuit said.

They did not find physical evidence that connected Lobato to Bailey’s killing, according to the lawsuit.

The police department and a lawyer for the two detectives, who are retired, did not immediately respond to requests for comment Sunday. The jury also found each of the two detectives liable for $10,000 in punitive damages.

Lobato was convicted of first-degree murder in Bailey’s death in May 2002.

The conviction was reversed on appeal, leading to a second trial. Lobato was convicted in October 2006 of voluntary manslaughter with use of a deadly weapon and sexual penetration of a dead body, and was sentenced to 13 to 45 years in prison.

A Nevada state court vacated her conviction in December 2017 because of ineffective legal representation. She was released from prison early the next month. This year, the court removed the conviction from her records and provided Lobato with a certificate of innocence.

In July 2019, she filed the lawsuit against the police department and the detectives.

The lawsuit said that when Bailey was killed in 2001, Lobato was at her parents’ home in Panaca, Nevada, which is nearly 170 miles northeast of Las Vegas. When Lobato was in Panaca, she told several people that she had been assaulted in May and had described defending herself.

She had been carrying a small knife and reached toward the man’s groin and cut him once, but did not sever his penis, the lawsuit said.

One of the people Lobato described the assault to told a Lincoln County probation officer about the attack. Lobato had not reported the attempted rape to police because she did not think they would do anything about it, according to the lawsuit.

On July 20, 2001, that probation officer called the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and was directed to the two detectives, who “instantly became convinced that they had just solved the murder,” the lawsuit said.

The detectives drove to Panaca that day and interviewed Lobato at her parents’ home, the lawsuit said.

She thought the detectives were investigating the attempted rape and was unaware that they were questioning her about the killing of Bailey, which she did not know about.

The detectives recorded a portion of the interrogation, but not all of it, and wrote in their police reports that the attack Lobato described was Bailey’s killing, according to the lawsuit. The detectives arrested her that day.

Several witnesses contacted the detectives and said Lobato was in Panaca on the day Bailey was killed, but they ignored the information, the lawsuit said. One witness gave them phone records that showed Lobato had been in Panaca from July 2 to July 9.

“Detectives not only framed Blaise Lobato for murder, but they actually used the trauma of her earlier, unrelated sexual assault to do it,” Elizabeth Wang, one of Lobato’s lawyers, said in a statement. “Blaise was a vulnerable teenager, and the criminal justice system failed her.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.