RENO, Nev. (AP) — Nearly three years after a former Nevada woman filed a lawsuit seeking compensation for spending more than three decades in prison for a murder she didn’t commit, her lawyers say the city of Reno is continuing to do everything it can to delay and deny her justice.
The latest dispute over Cathy Woods’ lawsuit centers on the city’s insistence she travel from her home in Anacortes, Washington to provide a deposition for a trial still months away.
Woods’ lawyers say she suffers from mental illness exacerbated by 35 years of wrongful imprisonment for a 1976 murder, and she’s too mentally fragile to make the trip.
Woods, 68, is seeking unspecified damages from Reno, ex-prosecutors and police she accuses of coercing a fabricated confession from her while she was a patient at a Louisiana mental hospital in 1979.
She was released from prison four years ago when newly available DNA evidence from a crime-scene cigarette butt linked the 1976 killing of a 19-year-old Reno college student to an Oregon inmate, Rodney Halbower.
Woods was bartending in Reno when Mitchell was killed. She later moved to Louisiana, and her mother committed her to the psychiatric hospital where Woods told a counselor about “a girl named Michelle being murdered in Reno.”
Owens said Woods was extremely psychotic and never should’ve been interrogated.