QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Concerns over Woods’ work were first brought up in 2014, then again in 2018. At that point, she was suspended from working on criminal cases but was then reinstated, according to an internal affairs report. In 2023, when an intern reported an anomaly in Woods’ test data at the lab, CBI took a deeper look into Woods’ work and found additional concerns with her work. “They knew about this in 2014 and allowed it to continue, and heard about it again in 2018 and allowed it to continue,” Mulligan (a defence attorney) said. “And yet we didn't find out about it for years … they had two strikes already and then finally got that third strike, and yet we continue to allow them to police themselves.”
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SECOND QUOTE OF THE DAY: Mulligan said she wants transparency and real change. “The damage is already done, so why not do it right and get some fairness for the people of Colorado and try to limit future damage,” she said. “Right now, the train is continuing to plow down the tracks. It's kind of like that ridiculous poster of the train that blasts through the train station and falls off the other side. Only imagine that the train is falling down like four more stories. And then onto another track and keeps on going, and then blasts through another train station and keeps on going. The train wreck is continuing to go on and on and on."
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STORY: "Legislation hoped to clear up the Missy Woods scandal. Defense attorneys are now overwhelmed with cases," by Justice Reporter Ava Kian, published by 000 000, on April 27, 2026.
GIST: "Years after former CBI forensic scientist Missy Woods’ misconduct came to light, defense attorneys worry there's not enough being done to restore justice to the people in potentially thousands of cases.
According to the law, crime labs were supposed to send all of the notices by September 2025, and the district attorneys were required to forward that to defendants within 91 days of receiving it. That means some cases missed one or both deadlines. Public defenders said they started seeing more notices roll in this winter.
Still, a notice is a beacon of hope for those whose cases have been mishandled
“I have several clients who now have hope that their claims of innocence will finally be heard and that they will finally get justice … I think they finally get some hope,” said Mary Claire Mulligan, a defense attorney. “They're like, ‘I'm finally going to get some justice out of this. I have a chance of finally someone listening to me. I've been saying I'm innocent for years.’”
The law has also created some unforeseen challenges. Its implementation is proving difficult and resource-intensive for Colorado’s defense attorneys, who say the burden has fallen on them. The majority of these cases are in the post-conviction phase — an area of law that requires specific skills that draws few attorneys to the field.
There’s also the matter of the limits of the law and what defendants are entitled to.
“CBI is making it difficult for us to get the information that we need in order to fully give effect to what FSIA entitles us to do to defend our clients,” Mulligan said. “The people in charge should let them just give us the information, show us what's going on right at the CBI. Because right now we're assuming the worst.”
CBI said in a statement that the law mandates comprehensive transparency, which it committed to comply with.
The agency said it is meeting the discovery requirements and ultimately, in districts where discovery is an issue at court, the judge makes the final call.
“The CBI works closely with each prosecutor and the Colorado Attorney General’s Office to ensure we are meeting our legal requirements,” said Rob Low, CBI’s strategic communications director, in a statement.
The whole system
For many defense attorneys, misconduct at the crime lab has cast doubt on the whole system, especially considering that discrepancies in Woods’ work were first mentioned in 2014 and then again in 2018. In 2023, the agency investigated after an intern brought up anomalies in Woods’ work.
The 65-year-old is facing 102 felony charges, including cybercrime, first-degree perjury and forgery. She has pleaded not guilty and her trial is expected to start in September.
Since Woods’ misconduct became news, other instances of evidence mishandling have been revealed.
A DNA analyst who worked for the Weld County Sheriff’s Office at the Northern Colorado Regional Forensic Lab was fired in 2024 after anomalies were found in her work. No criminal charges were filed in that case. According to CBI, one other person was also found to have misconduct, for which they’re sending notices.
One of key component of lab work is that work is reviewed by other employees through a process called “technical review.”
Mulligan, who first encountered Woods in the 90s and has cross-examined her a handful of times, said she recalls that in one case, when doubt was cast on the forensic report, Woods said that it can’t be wrong because it’s been reviewed.
“The technical reviewer had to have made mistakes or overlooked something or the technical review process is faulty in order for them to miss this or the technical reviewer was also committing fraud,” Mulligan said. “Technical reviewers are just as much a part of the problem as the original lab analyst. They're supposed to be the backstop. They're supposed to be what makes this a scientific result.”
How many cases?
CBI has sent out over 10,000 notices through the act, according to Low, the department’s communications director. He said that, through Colorado’s new law, three other cases were reported to district attorneys as being impacted by misconduct.
If that number seems high, it’s because notices are now being sent for every case that those employees worked on.
Zachary Brown, the deputy chief public defender at the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender, said they have received around 3,000 notices so far. Of those, roughly 600 people have requested counsel. They’ll be represented by state-funded counsel, either the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender or the Alternate Defense Counsel.
Impossible workload
As it stands, those organizations don’t have the capacity to handle these cases.
“We're figuring out how to handle this. It feels like it shouldn't all be our burden, right? The FSIA, the act about this, puts the burden on CBI and the prosecution, and it's us who are working to really provide these folks with zealous representation,” said Joanna Landau, the executive director for the Office of the Alternate Defense Counsel.
She said the act was a necessary first step, but they need support to follow through.
“The Forensic Science Integrity Act was an important acknowledgement of this problem and a huge step in addressing this massive scandal,” Landau said. “The problem is it doesn't solve the problem. It provides a process to help shed light on the problem. And so then there are all the other moving parts of how that actually happens, and that's the part that we're dealing with.”
It’s time-sensitive work. Legal action for most felony cases needs to be filed within three years of receiving the notice. For other crimes, it’s a narrower window.
“I just would hate to see someone miss out on a full, thorough investigation because it took a year to get him a lawyer. Or the worst-case scenario is you have an innocent person sitting in prison for an extra day, even because we couldn't get him a lawyer quick enough,” Mulligan said.
Mulligan is one of the attorneys representing Michael Clark, who spent 12 years in prison for allegedly murdering someone in 1994. His conviction was overturned, and he was released on bond after Woods’ misconduct was uncovered. His case will be retried.
Long process
Getting through these cases could take years. It requires lawyers who are versed in post-conviction law, a small field with few attorneys that includes reviewing mountains of evidence.
“Part of the slowdown that we're having is that we just don't have enough lawyers who are trained to do post-conviction work who can get on this huge influx of cases. I mean, if we're going to see a thousand cases come in, we've got a lot of work to do,” Mulligan said.
The organizations also need to bring in forensic experts who can understand the data.
Alternate Defense Counsel is looking to find contractors who will take these cases. They don’t have enough. So far, Landau said, they have taken on around 80 cases.
Unknown costs
As of March, Alternate Defense Counsel has spent just less than $500,000 on these cases, Landau said.
“The bulk of that money has been in this past calendar year, which to me says we're getting up and running with these cases, but we're just at the beginning and with the expected huge number of cases coming in, that number is going to get much higher,” she said.
The two organizations have requested $2 million from the legislature this session, which they hope will cover attorney and expert costs. They estimated that working on all these cases would take roughly $11 million, though they say the final price tag is unclear.
“It is impossible to fully understand how much Woods-related workload will increase for the agencies in FY 26-27, largely due to CBI’s continued delays over the past year in releasing information about her misconduct,” the Alternate Defense Counsel wrote in its budget request.
According to the First Judicial District Attorney, when criminal charges against Woods were announced in January 2025, the CBI estimated that the total cost of Woods’ alleged misconduct, through 2024, was $11,071,486.
The Joint Budget Committee that same month approved $7.5 million for CBI to retest DNA samples tampered with by Woods.
Procedural challenges
Mulligan and other defense attorneys said they’ve been dealing with pushback in court from CBI when requesting discovery, like information on technical reviewers. So they’ve been litigating it in court. Mulligan said there’s more than a handful of cases she worked on where Woods’ expert testimony was a key factor, which is why she thinks discovery about the technical reviewers is important.
“The district attorney's offices and AGs and CBI are in some situations saying, no, the FSIA doesn't apply to technical reviewers,” she said. “That's stonewalling us.”
She argues that the law allows that information to be shared with defendants. Under the statute, defendants have a right to discovery. Mulligan and other attorneys, like Brown, said they’re spending resources trying to get information.
“There's information in the government's possession that it doesn't want to reveal … the government can be a lot of folks, it can be district attorney's offices, it can be CBI, which is a government agency. Certainly, it can be the Attorney General's office where we have good faith disputes over these issues,” Brown said. “And that's been a long fight.”
The CBI pushed back against that characterization.
“The CBI is not stonewalling but meeting discovery requirements. The goal is not to delay or obstruct; we are committed to being transparent,” said CBI’s Rob Low.
Questions about oversight
While Mulligan and other defense attorneys praise the law for doing something about the issue, they say there’s still problems. There’s no oversight of the process, meaning CBI – or other crime labs, determine when there has been misconduct by an employee – and that would trigger the forensic law process.
Concerns over Woods’ work were first brought up in 2014, then again in 2018. At that point, she was suspended from working on criminal cases but was then reinstated, according to an internal affairs report.
In 2023, when an intern reported an anomaly in Woods’ test data at the lab, CBI took a deeper look into Woods’ work and found additional concerns with her work.
“They knew about this in 2014 and allowed it to continue, and heard about it again in 2018 and allowed it to continue,” Mulligan said. “And yet we didn't find out about it for years … they had two strikes already and then finally got that third strike, and yet we continue to allow them to police themselves.”
CBI said it’s committed to “building trust through comprehensive action, transparency, and accountability,” in a statement to CPR. The agency pointed to Woods’ immediate suspension and bringing in investigators from other states’ agencies for her criminal investigation as steps it’s taken to do so.
At CBI’s request, the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation opened a criminal investigation into the data anomalies in November 2023.
Worries about transparency remain
Mulligan said she would like to see a separate entity overseeing this.
Landau said she worries about transparency, especially with a discrepancy in the total number of cases that require a review. As of November, Alternate Defense Counsel had identified 1,536 cases it says are impacted by Woods’ misconduct.
CBI reports that her alleged misconduct impacted 1,045 cases.
Low said the CBI doesn't know how the Alternate Defense Counsel identifies cases and can't offer an explanation about the discrepancy. But he said that the bureau is confident that its numbers are correct. That presents a problem for some defense attorneys.
“We've identified cases that are not on CBI’s list,” Landau said. “I think it's going to be inherently subjective, but I hope the CBI continues to identify the cases so that we can get justice for the people who need it. But right now, I think we can't solely rely on them to identify everything that their own people did wrong.”
Having a separate entity do that work was discussed when crafting the law, said Rep. Matt Soper, one of the act’s sponsors. Ultimately, the cost proved too much.
“We wanted to bring on more contractors from outside the state to really look at what the full impact was within CBI,” he said. “We can still get through this as a state to be able to figure out where the wrong took place. And so we have to balance, unfortunately, at the end of the day, that resources are not unlimited.”
Audit points to culture
An external audit in 2025 found problems within the organization’s culture, citing things like the prior leadership prioritizing productivity and output, with minimum oversight.
Since then, CBI said it has changed policies, implemented new quality programs and added additional reviews to deter future misconduct, according to a statement.
Soper thinks the turnover and influx of new employees has shifted the culture. The CBI director retired in 2025 and was replaced with Armando Saldate.
Soper thinks people will have to trust that the culture has changed. For attorneys representing people who have been potentially wrongly incarcerated, there’s not much trust left.
“This all happened while CBI was policing itself. If it continues to do so, I don't see how things are going to change,” Mulligan said. “It doesn't feel just.”
Mulligan said she wants transparency and real change.
“The damage is already done, so why not do it right and get some fairness for the people of Colorado and try to limit future damage,” she said. “Right now, the train is continuing to plow down the tracks. It's kind of like that ridiculous poster of the train that blasts through the train station and falls off the other side. Only imagine that the train is falling down like four more stories. And then onto another track and keeps on going, and then blasts through another train station and keeps on going. The train wreck is continuing to go on and on and on.""
Editor's note: This story was updated to clarify that the additional misconduct reported at the CBI is not related to the Missy Woods case. It was also updated to include CBI's stance that they are confident in the number of cases they identified."
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.cpr.org/2026/04/27/legislation-missy-woods-scandal-defense-attorney/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
