The Colorado Supreme Court ordered a Weld County trial judge last week to respond to the district attorney’s claim that he improperly dismissed a criminal case because of “outrageous” conduct by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

Daniel Lee Eatinger stood accused of sexual assault on a child dating to July 2018. Prosecutors sought Eatinger’s arrest in 2020, following DNA testing that matched his profile to evidence collected from the victim. Law enforcement extradited him to Colorado in 2024.

By that time, the CBI had performed an internal investigation into longtime DNA analyst Yvonne “Missy” Woods. In 2024, the agency revealed that its highly reputed employee had been deleting, altering and manipulating findings in criminal cases for years.

Jefferson County prosecutors charged her in January 2025 with 102 felony counts in connection with her actions. After pleading guilty in June to one felony count each of cybercrime, perjury, forgery and attempting to influence a public servant, she now faces up to 16 years in prison.

On Aug. 2, weeks before Eatinger’s scheduled trial, District Court Judge Vincente G. Vigil dismissed Eatinger’s case due to “outrageous government conduct” implicating Eatinger’s constitutional right to due process. Vigil wrote that his conclusion was not based solely on the actions of Woods, who performed DNA analysis in Eatinger’s case. Instead, he faulted CBI for ignoring reports about Woods’ misconduct as early as 2014.

“The management at CBI at best fostered a workplace culture where case processing numbers were prioritized over rigorous technical oversight, and at worst actively sought to shield Ms. Woods, a favored employee, from having her deficient work product come to light,” he wrote. “It is beyond dispute that the unprecedented scope and breadth of the Woods DNA scandal has left a dark mark on the history of Colorado justice.”

Noting that outrageous government conduct violates “fundamental fairness and is shocking to the universal sense of justice,” Vigil acknowledged that only one appellate case in Colorado had upheld a trial judge’s finding of outrageous conduct. That case from 1991 involved La Plata County law enforcement fabricating a criminal case with a fictional, undercover defendant in order to entrap an unaware defense attorney into accepting weapons for services.

“If CBI had properly acted when made aware of Ms. Woods’ conduct, this would not be outrageous government conduct; rather, it would be an agency acting in the way we expect a government agency to act: monitoring to ensure its employees are acting to professional standards and addressing the issue when they are not,” Vigil wrote. “But the fact of the matter is that Ms. Woods chose to become a cancer within the Colorado Bureau of Investigations, and that agency chose first to ignore, then place a bandage on the tumor until it could no longer be hidden from public view.”

The Weld County District Attorney’s Office quickly sought the Supreme Court’s intervention, arguing that it did everything correctly once Woods’ misconduct came to light.

“Defendant’s case was audited and determined not to be an affected case with an anomaly. There were no alterations, deletions, or manipulations in Woods’ work in this case; Woods’ work in this case remains untainted in any way post-review,” wrote prosecutors, adding that the office also performed testing of new DNA samples with a different analyst and with a defense expert present.

Those additional steps “provide assurance that the initial testing in this case by Woods was reliable despite malfeasance she committed in unrelated cases,” the office wrote.

Finally, the prosecution argued that Vigil’s decision to “send a message” was inappropriate without any analysis of how, specifically, the CBI’s actions negatively affected Eatinger.

Even if other defendants in the more-than-1,000 cases affected by Woods’ misconduct demonstrate harm to their cases, “they cannot obtain the same drastic remedy the district court gifted to Eatinger. This lottery ticket approach to justice is manifestly unreasonable, arbitrary, and unfair,” the prosecution concluded.

In an Aug. 19 order, the Supreme Court directed Vigil to respond to the district attorney’s arguments.

The case is People v. Eatinger.

Reporter Jenny Deam contributed to this article.