The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department must pay $34 million to a woman who was arrested as a teenager and imprisoned for 16 years after being wrongfully convicted of murder, a federal jury decided last week. Two retired Las Vegas police detectives, Thomas Thowsen and James LaRochelle, must each pay out $10,000 for their roles in fabricating evidence in the case, the jury decided, reports the Washington Post. In 2001, Thowsen and LaRochelle accused Kirstin Blaise Lobato, then 18, of murdering Duran Bailey, a homeless man whose corpse was found mutilated. The detectives said Lobato confessed to killing Bailey. Lobato’s attorneys said she was not told about the murder investigation and was instead describing how she used a knife to fight off a different man who attempted to sexually assault her months earlier.
No physical evidence tied Lobato to the scene of Bailey’s death. Lobato had an alibi backed by phone records and witnesses. And the sexual assault she said she did fight off ended with her assailant escaping, she told the detectives. Thowsen and LaRochelle treated Lobato’s account as a confession to Bailey’s murder, and she was ultimately convicted of voluntary manslaughter in 2006. The conviction was vacated by a court in 2017 after a review of forensic evidence, and Lobato was released from prison. Lobato sued Thowsen, LaRochelle and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. “Detectives not only framed Blaise Lobato for murder, but they actually used the trauma of her earlier, unrelated sexual assault to do it,” said her attorney, Elizabeth Wang. “Blaise was a vulnerable teenager, and the criminal justice system failed her.”