A Las Vegas jury awarded $34 million on Thursday to a woman who had been wrongfully convicted for murder in 2001.
Kirstin Blaise Lobato served 16 years in prison for the murder of Duran Bailey. However, the jury found that two retired Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) detectives, Thomas Thowsen and James LaRochelle, fabricated evidence against the inmate, which resulted in her conviction.
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Lobato was exonerated in 2017 after her conviction was overturned. The court found that she had received ineffective counsel. She was later released in early 2018. A state court issued a Certificate of Innocence to her in October 2024. Yet, Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill and District Attorney Steve Wolfson have continued to challenge her innocence, writing a letter to the state attorney general questioning the evidence and her legal team’s tactics.
She later filed a lawsuit against the police department and two detectives.
The former inmate celebrated the outcome of the trial but voiced frustration at officials who continue to question her innocence. “There were points where I was shaking with rage because it’s so incredibly unfair that the truth is clear as day, and they still just dig in their feet,” she told 8 News New Investigators.
David Owens, an attorney representing Lobato, explained that the two detectives “built a bogus case around a teenager by weaponizing a rape attempt she survived” and lashed out at city officials who questioned his practices in defending his client.
“When you accuse me of lying and ask for an investigation into the things that I’ve done to represent my client, we have a problem,” Owens said, according to KSNV News 3. “Mr. elected D.A., Mr. Sheriff, if you want to talk to me about the things that I did for my client, you absolutely, you’re going to hear from me, for sure.”
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At the heart of the case were allegations that the two detectives mishandled evidence and mischaracterized statements during the investigation. They framed Lobato for the murder even though her alibi placed her in a different city at the time of the crime.
“Of course they intentionally framed her, and that’s what the jury saw,” said Elizabeth Wang, one of Lobato’s attorneys.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal noted that Lobato’s lawyers “accused detectives of using misleading witness statements, omitting facts in police reports, and destroying notes used to write those reports.
The detectives deceptively claimed Lobato had confessed to the murder even though she had only describe having defended herself against a sexual assault in a separate incident with a different individual one month before the crime was committed.
Bailey was found dead on July 8, 2001, badly beaten and with his penis severed.
Lobato’s attorneys argued that Lobato only ever admitted to fighting back when a man attempted to sexually assault her in May 2001 in east Las Vegas, and that she slashed at his lower body with a knife before running away. Her attorneys argued that Bailey was killed over a month later on the other side of town and that his penis has been cut off after he had died, which didn’t match Lobato’s description of her attack.
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Lobato’s attorneys accused the two detectives of either knowing their client was innocent, or being indifferent to her innocence.
The jury’s verdict came after a nine-day trial and a day and a half of deliberations. In addition to the $34 million in compensatory damages, they awarded $10,000 in punitive damages from both of the detectives.
