People v. Eatinger
What's at Stake
In 2023, the State of Colorado admitted to the public that a state DNA analyst, Missy Woods, had manipulated data and tampered with evidence in potentially thousands of criminal cases. But the State did not learn of Woods’s malfeasance in 2023. In fact, Woods’s supervisors had been aware of it since 2014. Instead of investigating her fraud and disclosing it to defendants in affected cases, however, the supervisors covered it up and allowed her to continue working on cases—including Daniel Eatinger’s case here—for another decade.
The ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative, the ACLU of Colorado, and the Exoneration Project filed an amicus brief with the Colorado Supreme Court arguing that Woods and her supervisors violated their constitutional duty to disclose her misconduct, and that the Court should order systemic remedies for the thousands of defendants who have been harmed.
Summary
Missy Woods worked as a DNA analyst for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for 29 years. In 2014 and again in 2018, coworkers caught Woods manipulating data and tampering with evidence and reported her to lab supervisors. But rather than address or disclose the fraud, the supervisors covered it up and allowed Woods to continue working on criminal cases. The CBI did not publicly disclose her malfeasance until 2023.
In its belated investigation, CBI determined that as many as 10,786 of Woods’s cases may have been tainted and confirmed misconduct in at least 1,045 cases. But because lab supervisors had covered up the scandal for so long, a lot of the lab’s instrument data had been purged. This makes it impossible for many defendants to prove that Woods committed misconduct in their specific cases. In one such case, the trial court granted Daniel Eatinger’s motion to dismiss his indictment based on outrageous government conduct. The State now asks the Colorado Supreme Court to reverse the dismissal, arguing that Mr. Eatinger cannot prove Woods’s fraud affected his case.
The ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative, the ACLU of Colorado, and the Exoneration Project filed an amicus brief focusing on the need for the Colorado Supreme Court to implement remedies that apply to all defendants in Woods-involved cases—and to ensure that the burden of remedying the State’s egregious misconduct falls on the State, not on the defendants harmed. We argue that Woods and CBI supervisors violated their constitutional and statutory duty to disclose exculpatory and impeachment evidence concerning Woods’s misconduct, and that failure to disclose is imputed to the prosecution teams Woods worked on. We also argue that the Court has substantial supervisory authority to remedy the State’s systemic misconduct.
To that end, we urge the Court to: (1) dismiss at least some affected cases and require prosecutors to dismiss cases they cannot or wish not to prosecute; (2) impose a presumption of misconduct in every Woods-involved case, such that the State must prove that misconduct did not taint the evidence in any case it wishes to continue prosecuting; and (3) impose any other measures necessary to deter similar the government from committing similar misconduct in the future, including monetary sanctions.