A man convicted of a 1976 homicide at a Colorado Springs hotel may be able to present his argument for a new trial after the state’s second-highest court ruled that an El Paso County judge must appoint an attorney to pursue his claims of innocence.

In 2014, a jury convicted Robert W. Baillie of murdering Janet K. Conrad, a housekeeper at The Antlers hotel. Conrad, 38, was found dead in a laundry room in 1976, having been strangled and sexually assaulted. The case went cold for more than three decades until DNA evidence from the victim’s body matched Conrad’s profile in 2012.

The Court of Appeals rejected Baillie’s appeal in 2017, and a trial court judge similarly denied his request for postconviction relief in 2018. In August 2020, Baillie sent a letter to then-District Court Judge Timothy J. Schutz, who presided over his trial. Baillie claimed he “just found” a document that linked DNA evidence on Conrad’s body to an alternate suspect.

Shortly afterward, District Court Judge Erin Sokol, who had taken over Baillie’s case, denied his new postconviction challenge as “successive.” She wrote that Baillie had made a claim “that either has already been brought or that could have been presented in an appeal previously brought or postconviction proceeding previously brought.”

However, on Thursday, a three-judge panel for the Court of Appeals reversed Sokol’s decision. Without passing judgment on the merit of Baillie’s challenge, or even whether he was entitled to a hearing before the trial court, the panel found that Sokol made a mistake by appointing the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender to represent Baillie.

Because Baillie’s claim raised the possibility that his public defender at trial was ineffective for not presenting DNA evidence that could have created reasonable doubt about Baillie’s guilt, the office had a conflict of interest in Baillie’s postconviction challenge.

“Having made the decision to appoint postconviction counsel, the district court may not deny Baillie the effective representation of counsel,” wrote Judge Michael H. Berger in the May 5 opinion, noting that part of effective representation means no conflicts.

Baillie’s August 2020 letter stated that there would have been reasonable doubt of his guilt if the DNA evidence he reportedly discovered was introduced at trial. In a more detailed letter he sent to the public defender’s office in March 2020, he elaborated that he “just found” a report that linked a semen sample found on Conrad’s body to a specific man. Baillie did not specify how he obtained the report, and he allegedly sent his only copy with the letter to the public defender’s office.

At the time of the murder, “I was dating the niece of the murder victim and spent much time in the victim’s home,” Baillie wrote. “My DNA could have easily been transferred to the victim’s clothing and hands and then on to anything she would touch.”

When the Court of Appeals previously denied Baillie’s appeal, it found the DNA evidence was sufficient to support his conviction. Similarly, the trial judge who reviewed Baillie’s first claim for postconviction relief, known as a Rule 35(c) petition, found no basis to grant his request.

After Baillie sent his August 2020 letter, Sokol appointed the public defender’s office to represent Baillie and to explain why she should not dismiss his petition because it was successive. Rule 35(c) prohibits defendants from filing successive motions based on similar allegations in hopes that a “sympathetic judicial ear may eventually be found.”

Managing Deputy State Public Defender Rosalie Roy responded and agreed that Baillie had already raised the DNA issue on his prior appeal. She noted that, if Sokol allowed Baillie to pursue his latest challenge, the public defender’s office would ask her to appoint a different defense attorney “due to an ethical conflict of interest.”

After Sokol rejected Baillie’s Rule 35(c) petition, attorney Lynn C. Hartfield, who the Court of Appeals appointed to represent Baillie, argued that her client deserved a lawyer with no conflict of interest who could investigate his claims of newly-discovered DNA evidence or possibly ineffective assistance of counsel.

“If there was a report that was overlooked or misinterpreted at trial that actually points to a particular suspect, that would change the nature of this case,” she said.

The Colorado Attorney General’s Office responded that there was no evidence from the trial of any semen sample linked to an alternate suspect, nor was it clear that the report Baillie had referenced in his letter even existed.

“He can be as creative as he can be. We should not reward that with evidentiary hearings and investigations because he ‘just’ discovered this, when the allegations are that there are semen samples that do not exist, that there is a phantom report that he mysteriously sent away his only copy of, that there’s a conspiracy of police, prosecutors and public defenders who all had this information and buried it,” argued attorney Kevin E. McReynolds. “That’s not what postconviction relief is for. We’re not creating perpetual opportunities to refute whatever fact the defendant might come up with.”

Hartfield clarified that there was nothing that conclusively ruled out the presence of another man’s DNA.

Under the standard the U.S. Supreme Court has set for ineffective assistance of counsel claims, a defendant must show that their trial lawyer’s performance fell below an “objective standard of reasonableness” and that the outcome likely would have been different if not for the errors. An analysis by the Innocence Project showed that one in five people who were later exonerated by DNA evidence alleged they received ineffective assistance of counsel, but appeals courts had rejected the vast majority of those claims.

The case is People v. Baillie.