Andy Barron / The Reno Gazette-Journal via AP
In this Sept. 8, 2014, file photo, Cathy Woods appears in Washoe District court in Reno. Woods filed a civil suit 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.
Monday, Feb. 25, 2019 | 2 a.m.
RENO — 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 Washington state to provide a deposition in preparation 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.
"There is a stunning cruelty in the Reno defendants' approach to this issue," her attorney David Owens wrote in a motion filed Feb. 18 in federal court in Reno. To them, "the fact that she was wrongfully convicted is her fault."
Woods, 68, who now lives near Anacortes, Washington, 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.
Woods received inadequate mental treatment, including electroshock therapy, during decades of imprisonment and still suffers from severe paranoid schizophrenia, her lawyers say.
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.
Detectives in Reno and Northern California subsequently identified him as the "Gypsy Hills Killer." He was convicted last September of the 1976 killings of two teens in the San Francisco Bay Area and sentenced to life in prison.
Authorities believe he raped and killed six women and girls — including Michelle Mitchell in Reno in 1976. But he only was charged with the cold-case murders of 17-year-old Paula Baxter and 18-year-old Veronica Cascio.
The killer's nickname was based on the area of Pacifica, south of San Francisco, where one body was found.
Woods' attorneys recently deposed Halbower in prison.
Mark Hughs, an attorney for the city of Reno, previously questioned whether she's competent to testify.
Reno City Attorney Karl Hall also suggested in January that Woods' lawyers are exaggerating her condition to take advantage of the deposition process and force defense attorneys to expend resources.
"After vigorously representing to the court and defendants that Woods is competent, medically and mentally stable, and able to actively participate in these proceedings ... plaintiffs now represent that if Ms. Woods were to come to the venue where the trial would occur, it would have a prohibitively detrimental effect on her medical and mental health," Hughs wrote Feb. 12.
Owens countered: "It is beyond cynical to claim or suggest that the struggles of a mentally ill woman who spent more than 35 years imprisoned for a crime of which she was innocent after she was voluntarily committed in a psychiatric facility are some form of 'gamesmanship' to gain an advantage in this case."
Woods' initial conviction in 1980 was overturned by Nevada's Supreme Court. She was convicted again in 1984 before a Washoe County judge vacated the conviction in 2014. Prosecutors withdrew the charges in 2015.
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.
Public defender Maizie Pusich told The Associated Press in 2014 that Woods didn't remember confessing.
"I'm told it was a product of wanting to get a private room," Pusich said. "She was being told she wasn't sufficiently dangerous to qualify, and within a short period she was claiming she had killed a woman in Reno."
