Elizabeth Wang

A Motel Parking Lot in May

Late in May 2001, Kirstin Blaise Lobato — eighteen years old — 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.

A Homicide Three Hours Away

Duran Bailey was killed on July 8, behind a bank building in Las Vegas.

Lobato was in Panaca, about three hours north, with family members and neighbors who accounted for her whereabouts. Her parents' landline told the same story: call records showed the ordinary telephone traffic of a teenager at home, calls to her friends that no one else in the house would have made.

She had never met Bailey. No physical or forensic evidence connected her to him or to the place where he died. No witness said she had killed anyone, and she knew none of the nonpublic facts ordinarily expected from a perpetrator.

How One Account Became Another

Detectives treated her account of the earlier, unrelated assault as a confession to the homicide.

She had described a different time, a different place, and a man who was alive when she left. What the investigative reports produced was something else: disputed language attributed to her, and details of the May assault recast as details of the July killing.

The two events had one thing in common — a woman with a knife and a man's groin — and that was enough to build a prosecution on, provided the differences disappeared.

The Notes They Destroyed

The detectives destroyed their handwritten interview notes after preparing the reports.

That single fact structured the civil case. Where the contemporaneous record is gone, the only remaining evidence of what a witness actually said is the report itself — written by the people whose account is in question, and no longer checkable against anything.

Sixteen Years

The Nevada Supreme Court reversed Lobato's first conviction. She was convicted again in 2006.

Expert evidence eventually placed the death at a time when prosecutors conceded she was in Panaca.

On December 19, 2017, a Nevada court vacated the conviction. Ten days later, it dismissed every charge on the district attorney's motion. In October 2024 — twenty-three years after the arrest — a Nevada court issued Lobato a certificate of innocence.

No Qualified Immunity

Wang and her colleagues sued detectives Thomas Thowsen and James LaRochelle for fabricating evidence.

In October 2023, the Ninth Circuit held that the detectives were not entitled to qualified immunity on that claim, concluding that the differences and omissions between Lobato's statements and the reports could support a finding that the detectives had deliberately made the reports suggest she killed the victim.

Qualified immunity is where most police-misconduct claims end, and clearing it in a case built on documents rather than eyewitnesses required showing that the gap between what she said and what was written was too large and too directional to be explained as error.

Nine Trial Days

Wang tried the case with David Owens, Megan Pierce, and Rajan Dhungana, beginning December 2, 2024. The remaining claims alleged fabrication of evidence under federal and Nevada law, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

In closing, Wang reminded the jurors what the word verdict means in Latin: to speak the truth.

After nine trial days, the jury found both detectives liable on every count, and awarded $34 million in compensatory damages plus $10,000 in punitive damages against each detective — an award the trial team described as the largest believed to have been returned for a wrongfully convicted woman.

What the Court Found in the Record

On March 31, 2026, U.S. District Judge Richard F. Boulware II denied the defendants' requests for judgment as a matter of law and for a new trial. The order found substantial evidence that the detectives knew of, or deliberately disregarded, signs of Lobato's innocence.

The defendants appealed on May 5. The Ninth Circuit set September 28, 2026 as the opening-brief deadline, and the appeal remains pending.

Thirty Thousand Pepper Balls

Wang represented five of twelve demonstrators — Sara Fitouri, Jacquelyn Parkins, Elle Taylor, Claire Sannier, and Joe Deras — in a fifteen-day federal trial concerning the Denver police use of less-lethal munitions during protests from May 28 through June 2, 2020. She led the litigation across several of the Denver protest lawsuits, of which this was the first to reach a jury.

The evidence addressed force used against peaceful demonstrators, and connected crowd-control policy and training deficiencies to the constitutional violations the jury considered.

Denver issued less-lethal weapons to a force whose officers were not all trained to use them. At the outset, the department did not require ordinary use-of-force reports and did not consistently activate body-worn cameras.

It exhausted 30,000 pepper balls on the first day, and restocked.

Those facts describe a department that had armed its officers with weapons it was not tracking the use of — no reports, no video, and no count until the supply ran out.

The Alley on Colfax

The trial record tied 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.

Each of those events is a Fourth Amendment claim on its own. Together, and alongside the missing reports and inactive cameras, they became evidence of something the individual incidents could not establish alone: that no one was supervising the use of these weapons at all.

Training They Once Had

The jury found First and Fourth Amendment violations, held Denver liable for inadequate training, and awarded the twelve plaintiffs $14.75 million, with individual compensatory awards ranging from $750,000 to $3 million.

On April 21, 2026, a unanimous Tenth Circuit panel affirmed in Packard v. City and County of Denver, in an opinion by Judge David M. Ebel. The court rejected Denver's arguments and upheld the verdict — resting specifically, as the opinion took care to say, on the jury's finding that Denver inadequately trained its officers.

That theory is among the most difficult in constitutional litigation, because it requires showing that a municipality was deliberately indifferent — not merely that its training was imperfect.

The proof came from the city's own history. Denver had once trained officers for mass protests, after problems during Occupy Denver, and later reduced that preparation. Expert testimony — which the panel held the jury was entitled to credit — established that another large civil-justice protest was utterly predictable, and that the diminished crowd-control and less-lethal-munitions training was deliberately indifferent to what would happen when one arrived.

A city that never trained can argue it did not know. A city that trained, learned why the training was necessary, and then stopped cannot.

Agents, Not Officers

In 2025, the practice extended from municipal police departments to federal ones.

In federal court in Chicago, Wang and her colleagues won a temporary restraining order and then a preliminary injunction against the Department of Homeland Security and its officers, restraining violations of the First and Fourth Amendment rights of protesters, religious practitioners, and observers during federal immigration-enforcement operations.

The Chicago case addressed issues also present in her Denver work: crowd-control force, less-lethal munitions, and the rights of people documenting and objecting to government action. The Denver case produced a damages verdict after the events; the Chicago orders imposed prospective limits during the federal operation.

A Store Counter in Georgia

Before joining Loevy + Loevy, Wang worked on racial-targeting litigation through the ACLU's Drug Law Reform Project.

As a legal fellow with the ACLU's Drug Law Reform Project, she represented South Asian convenience-store owners in rural Georgia who had been racially targeted by law enforcement in a sweeping federal prosecution — shopkeepers charged over ordinary household products sold across every counter in the county, singled out from the other merchants who sold the same things.

The representation required challenging an investigation that had singled out a minority community while similarly situated merchants sold the same ordinary products.

Boulder Practice and National Appeals

Wang is a partner in Loevy + Loevy's Boulder office, which she joined in the fall of 2008, and litigates civil-rights and post-conviction cases nationwide — wrongful convictions, malicious prosecutions, First Amendment violations, excessive force, and the municipal policy and training failures that connect individual incidents to municipal responsibility. She has tried numerous federal jury cases, argued repeatedly in the federal courts of appeals, and represents petitioners in post-conviction and habeas proceedings alongside her civil docket.

She earned an A.B. from the University of Chicago in 2001 and a J.D. from its law school in 2005, where she worked in the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic's Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project.

She clerked for U.S. District Judge Harry D. Leinenweber and Ninth Circuit Judge Betty B. Fletcher. From 2010 to 2012, she served as a Lecturer in Law in the University of Chicago's Exoneration Project, supervising post-conviction work alongside her civil docket.