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At just 18 years old, Kirstin “Blaise” Lobato was wrongfully convicted of the brutal murder of Duran Bailey, a homeless man whose mutilated corpse was found behind a dumpster in Las Vegas in 2001. Lobato was hours away when the crime happened, but Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) officers made her a suspect anyway and accused her of confessing to a crime she knew nothing about.

In December 2017, following the presentation of evidence further showing Lobato could not have committed the crime, the Clark County District Court in Nevada vacated Lobato’s convictions. The following month she was released after spending over a decade and a half imprisoned.

Seven years later, a civil trial jury awarded Lobato $34 million in damages for violations of her rights by Las Vegas officers that caused her wrongful conviction. Professor David B. Owens, director of ������Ƶ’s Civil Rights and Justice Clinic, represented Lobato in the lawsuit with civil-rights firm Loevy & Loevy. Clinical law students drafted motions and worked with Professor Owens throughout the trial, witnessing first-hand how a jury trial operates.

In the accompanying video, Professor Owens expands on why the LVMPD pursued Lobato as a suspect, the benefits for students working on real life cases such as these and how this case impacts other cases going forward.

Read the Transcript

David B. Owens: So, Blaise lived in Panaca, Nevada, which is like a three-hour drive away from Las Vegas where this murder happened, and she was there when it happened.

Her parents had a landline. They had a phone in a physical location, and so they had these phone records, and you could see all the phone calls that she was making to her friends that her parents would have never made. No one could really challenge her alibi being in Panaca when she said she was there, but they were able to spin this crazy theory that this seven- or nine-hour event happened.

My name is David B Owens. I'm an assistant professor of law and the director of the Civil Rights and Justice Clinic.

Kirsten Lobato was convicted, wrongfully, of murder of a guy named Duran Bailey in Las Vegas. And that was a really brutal, heinous murder. And he had had his genitals cut off post-mortem. Blaise — that's what she goes by — had survived a sexual assault a month and a half prior and told people that she survived it by trying to cut at the attacker’s genitals.

Once the police, sort of, saw that, “Oh, two people, you know, had a similar thing happen,” they, sort of, unleashed all of this. And said that she had confessed to the murder when she hadn't. And so there's all this forensic evidence at the crime scene that didn't link to her, because it was their whole theory that she was high on drugs and she was doing all this other crazy stuff.

I think so much of the lead up, and the years and years and years of litigation to get to that moment have led to this thing — and then the pain of the trial itself — you're sort of just stealing yourself for the worst. And I think for Blaise, the courts haven't been good to her. The last time that she was in a formal courtroom setting it didn't go well.

In 2002, Blaze was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to 40 to 100 years in prison. In a 2006 retrial, Blaise was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to 13 to 45 years. On January 3, 2018, Blaise was released after being wrongfully imprisoned for over a decade and a half. Nearly seven years later, Blaze was awarded $34 million in damages.

This is a verdict that is about survivors and about women who survived sexual assault and have told their stories and are now believed. Our whole clinic worked on it in variety of ways. Three of our clinic students were able to travel down to Las Vegas to be a part of the trial.

We're in a library. There's a lot of books. There's a lot of things you can read about what happened in this case, in that case, and trials. And it's another thing to see one up and personal.

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, they need to look around and figure out what happened here. I think it serves as a message to others that this type of stuff, you know, it won't hide.