First, she was exonerated. Now a jury in Las Vegas has awarded Kirstin Blaise Lobato $34 million after she served 16 years for a murder she didn't commit, reports the Las Vegas Review-Journal. In addition to the sum from the city police department, the jury ordered the two detectives on her case to pay $10,000 each after concluding they fabricated evidence. Both men are now retired. "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 was convicted of murdering 44-year-old Duran Bailey in Las Vegas in 2001, when she was 18, per the Washington Post. Her lawyers say detectives disregarded phone records and witness statements proving she was 170 miles away at the time. What doomed her was that she had told a probation officer she had fended off a would-be rapist in Las Vegas by using a small knife to cut her assailant in the groin, reports the New York Times. The probation officer called the detectives to report the story, because Bailey's penis had been severed.
The detectives immediately drove to interview Lobato at her parents' house in Panaca, Nevada, on the pretext of investigating the attempted rape. In their report of the interview, they wrote that Lobato was describing the murder of Bailey, not the sexual assault. "Detectives not only framed Blaise Lobato for murder, but they actually used the trauma of her earlier, unrelated sexual assault to do it," says attorney Elizabeth Wang. Lobato "was a vulnerable teenager, and the criminal justice system failed her." (More wrongful conviction stories.)
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