Elizabeth Wang

The Crime She Survived

At eighteen, Kirstin Blaise Lobato survived an attempted rape in a motel parking lot. Detectives made her account of that attack evidence that she had killed a man she had never met. At the civil trial, Elizabeth Wang put the two events back on their actual dates.

Two Places, Six Weeks Apart

Late in May 2001, Lobato was visiting friends in Las Vegas when a man tried to rape her in a motel parking lot. She carried a small knife for protection. She slashed toward his groin, broke free and drove away; when she looked back, the man was alive and moving. Over the following weeks, she told several people what had happened.

Duran Bailey was killed on July 8 behind a bank building in Las Vegas. His body bore injuries wholly unlike the encounter Lobato had described. Lobato was in Panaca, about three hours north, with family members and neighbors who accounted for her whereabouts. Lobato had never met Bailey, and no physical or forensic evidence connected her to him or to the place where he died.

Twelve days after the killing, a rumor reached Las Vegas police: someone had heard from someone else that Lobato said she had cut a man in Las Vegas. Detectives drove to Panaca. In the recorded interview, Lobato said the attack had occurred “at least a month ago,” in a motel parking lot, and that the man was alive when she left. Believing the detectives were telling her that her attacker had later died, she expressed remorse. They treated her answers as a confession to Bailey’s murder.

Lobato was tried twice. The Nevada Supreme Court reversed her first conviction; a second jury convicted her in 2006. On December 19, 2017, after experts placed Bailey’s death at a time when even prosecutors conceded Lobato was in Panaca, Clark County District Judge Stefany Miley vacated the judgment. Ten days later, Chief Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez dismissed every charge on the district attorney’s motion. Lobato left prison after serving more than fifteen years.

Destroyed Interview Notes

The detectives destroyed their handwritten interview notes after writing the formal reports. Those reports attributed language to Lobato that she denied using and recast details of the May assault as details of the July homicide. By the time Lobato brought a federal civil-rights action in 2019, the reports had been cited in two criminal trials and years of review.

Wang and her colleagues sued detectives Thomas Thowsen and James LaRochelle for fabricating evidence. An interlocutory appeal reached the Ninth Circuit before trial. In October 2023, the court held that the detectives were not entitled to qualified immunity on the fabrication claim. Viewing the evidence in Lobato’s favor, the Ninth Circuit held that differences and omissions between her statements and the detectives’ reports could show that they deliberately made the reports suggest she had killed Bailey.

The opinion cleared a path to trial without deciding who was telling the truth. The jury would see the two accounts, the chronology and the missing notes. It would also hear what the detectives knew: Lobato had described an earlier attack across town; no physical evidence connected her to Bailey; no witness said she had killed anyone; and she could provide none of the nonpublic facts ordinarily expected from a perpetrator.

Nine Days in December

The federal trial began on December 2, 2024. Wang represented Lobato with David Owens, Megan Pierce and Rajan Dhungana. The remaining claims charged the two detectives with fabricating evidence under federal and Nevada law and intentionally inflicting emotional distress. After nine trial days, the jury found for Lobato against both defendants on every count.

The jury awarded $34 million in compensatory damages and assessed another $10,000 in punitive damages against each detective. Outside the courthouse, Wang summarized the verdict in eleven words.

On March 31, 2026, U.S. District Judge Richard F. Boulware II denied the detectives’ requests for judgment as a matter of law and a new trial. His order found substantial evidence supporting the jury’s conclusion that the detectives knew of, or deliberately disregarded, signs of Lobato’s innocence. The defendants filed an appeal on May 5, leaving the jury judgment and the district court’s post-trial ruling in place while appellate review proceeds.

Thirty Thousand Pepper Balls

Another of Wang’s cases began in Denver’s streets after George Floyd’s murder. Thousands demonstrated from May 28 through June 2, 2020. Some people committed violence and damaged property. Officers also used tear gas, pepper balls, lead-filled Kevlar bags and other less-lethal munitions against people who were protesting peacefully. Twelve injured demonstrators brought the claims that went to a fifteen-day federal trial; Wang represented five.

The trial record connected crowd-control policy to specific injuries. Zach Packard kicked a tear-gas canister away from a group and was struck in the head by a lead-filled bag, fracturing his skull, breaking his neck and knocking him unconscious. Joe Deras also kicked away tear gas and was hit in the head, back and hand. On Colfax Avenue, an incident commander ordered officers to surround peaceful marchers and deploy gas and flash grenades; people fled through a narrow alley while officers continued firing pepper balls.

Denver had issued less-lethal weapons to a partially trained force. At the outset, the department lacked ordinary use-of-force reporting requirements and consistent body-camera activation. It exhausted 30,000 pepper balls on the first day and restocked. Its independent monitor later found gaps in training, coordination, and internal controls. A jury found First and Fourth Amendment violations and held Denver liable for inadequate training, awarding the twelve plaintiffs $14.75 million.

On April 21, 2026, a unanimous Tenth Circuit panel affirmed. The court focused on failure to train. Denver had once trained officers for mass protests after problems during Occupy Denver, then reduced that preparation under a new chief. Expert testimony allowed the jury to find that another large civil-rights protest was foreseeable and that inadequate crowd-control and less-lethal-munitions training reflected deliberate indifference.

Boulder Practice and National Appeals

Wang practices from Loevy + Loevy’s Boulder office and litigates civil-rights and post-conviction cases nationwide. She earned both her undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Chicago. In law school, she worked in the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic’s Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project. She later clerked for U.S. District Judge Harry D. Leinenweber and Ninth Circuit Judge Betty B. Fletcher, served as an ACLU Drug Law Reform Project fellow, and taught in the University of Chicago’s Exoneration Project.

Chronology as Exonerating Evidence

Wang’s two central trial records depend on sequence. Lobato’s account belonged to May; Bailey’s murder occurred in July. The Denver plaintiffs’ actions and police responses unfolded minute by minute across streets, command decisions, and deployments of less-lethal weapons. In both matters, the legal claim became clear only when the events were restored to their actual order.

That method resists the compression that often favors government defendants. A report can make an earlier assault sound like a confession. A crowd-control label can make separate uses of force appear as one undifferentiated response. Wang’s work separates the actors, timestamps, warnings, weapons, and injuries so a jury can decide responsibility at the correct scale.

Verdict and Preservation

The Lobato judgment remained intact after post-trial review and continues through appellate proceedings. The Denver verdict reached the Tenth Circuit and was affirmed. Those stages require a trial record built for more than the moment of decision: objections preserved, evidence linked to each element, municipal proof distinguished from individual force, and damages anchored to named plaintiffs.

Wang handles wrongful-conviction, police-misconduct, and municipal-liability cases because each turns on the official record. In those cases, Wang examines what happened, who wrote the official account, what that account left out, and whether it survives comparison with evidence the government did not control.