A Colorado woman who saw her 2009 murder conviction overturned last year is now seeking more than $830,000 from the state under a rarely used law that allows payments to people exonerated of crimes.
Acacia Lyn-Darr, 47, spent 11 years and 10 months in prison after she was wrongly convicted of felony murder in the 2009 killing of Robert Piserchio in Pueblo.
A judge erased her conviction in 2025, and prosecutors went on to dismiss the charges against her, acknowledging they could not prove their case.
Lyn-Darr filed a petition last week seeking nearly $832,000 under a 2013 law that pays exonerated people up to $70,000 for every year they spent behind bars for felony crimes they did not commit. The law also allows for a tuition waiver at state universities and payments for legal fees.
“Ms. Lyn-Darr had more than a decade of her life taken from her,” said Eric Klein, one of her attorneys. She hopes the money will help her rebuild, and she is considering attending college, he said.
If her petition is successful, Lyn-Darr would become just the fourth person to receive exoneration compensation from the state since the Colorado Exoneration Act was passed 13 years ago.
The state has paid out $3.2 million to three wrongly convicted people and an additional $345,000 to their attorneys under the law, according to records provided by the Colorado Judicial Department, which processes the payments.
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser has not yet decided whether to concede or oppose Lyn-Darr’s petition for compensation, spokesman Lawrence Pacheco said Tuesday.
Since 2019, no petition opposed by Weiser’s office has been successful, and payments have only been made when the attorney general concedes the case, according to records kept by the office.
A co-defendant falsely confessed
Lyn-Darr was wrongfully convicted of participating in the killing of 50-year-old Piserchio at his Pueblo home on Dec. 10, 2009, during what prosecutors at the time said was a robbery gone wrong. Piserchio was bound with duct tape, tortured and beaten. His body was set on fire.
A jury convicted Lyn-Darr after her then-boyfriend, Matthew Barnes, falsely confessed that he was involved in the killing and claimed that Lyn-Darr also took part in the attack. Neither person was there, and the killing was actually carried out by another man who acted alone, Lyn-Darr’s attorneys wrote in the petition for compensation. That man, Aaron Wilkerson, was also convicted of felony murder.
Barnes confessed to the killing after four hours of interrogation by investigators with the Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office, and only after a 30-minute window in which the camera recording the interrogation “suddenly and inexplicably stopped working,” Lyn-Darr’s attorneys, Klein and Gail Johnson, wrote in the petition.
The camera came back on as Barnes made his confession. The moment he switched from declaring his innocence to confessing to murder was not captured on the sheriff’s office’s recording.
The investigators on the case fed Barnes information about the killing, even showing him crime scene photos, and he adjusted his story to match their demands, according to the petition.
“When Mr. Barnes said he did not think anything had been used to bind the victim’s hands or feet, the PCSO investigators told him: “Think real hard. Duct tape,'” the petition reads. The man was high on methamphetamine and sleep-deprived during the eight-hour interrogation, according to the petition.
Barnes recanted his confession three months later in a letter to his attorney, then wrote another letter reversing his position again 10 days after that. He had, in that 10-day window, decided to take a deal in which he would plead guilty to second-degree murder and be sentenced to 30 years in prison — avoiding the mandatory life sentence that would come with a first-degree murder conviction. As part of the deal, he was required to testify against Lyn-Darr during her jury trial.
Lyn-Darr maintained her innocence from the beginning and said she was in Denver at the time of the killing. She was convicted at trial after Barnes testified against her. Prosecutors zeroed in on Lyn-Darr as a suspect after she attempted to cash a check stolen from the victim four days after his death; she said Wilkerson gave her the checks, and that she did not know where he had gotten them.
Pueblo County District Court vacated Lyn-Darr’s convictions in 2025, finding that there was “no reliable evidence” tying her to the homicide. Barnes testified during the post-conviction proceedings that he’d falsely implicated Lyn-Darr, and the judge noted significant evidence that his confession was false.
“Everything about the crime that he described in his confession was either provided to him by the police, is uncorroborated by any other evidence, or is actually contradicted by other evidence,” the judge wrote in an 18-page order erasing Lyn-Darr’s convictions.
Barnes remains incarcerated and his conviction stands, court and prison records show, but he filed a petition for post-conviction relief in March and his case has been reopened. His attorney did not return a request for comment Tuesday.
A fourth person who pleaded guilty in connection with Piserchio’s killing, Brandon Armijo, has also claimed innocence. He pleaded guilty in 2012 to aggravated robbery in exchange for the dismissal of all other charges and was sentenced to 24 years in prison — a term that ran concurrently with a 21-year prison sentence he was already serving for unrelated crimes when he pleaded guilty in the Piserchio attack, .
He has since been released on parole and his criminal case appeared to be closed.
Few payouts under 2013 law
Lynn-Darr is one of only a small number of people who have sought compensation under the 2013 law, records show. Only three have received payments.
Robert Dewey, who was wrongfully convicted in 1996 of murder and rape in the death of 19-year-old Jacie Taylor in Palisade, was cleared by DNA evidence in 2012 and set free after nearly 18 years in prison, was the first to receive compensation under the Colorado Exoneration Act. He was paid nearly $1.2 million between 2013 and 2017, according to the judicial records. His case inspired the law.
Clarence Moses-El, who was wrongly convicted of a 1987 rape in Denver and sentenced to 48 years in prison, received $1.9 million in 2019 after spending 28 years incarcerated. His conviction was tossed in 2015 and he was acquitted during a second trial in 2016.
Klein and Johnson also represented Moses-El. Klein on Tuesday remembered when he realized Moses-El would receive the compensation.
“It was a moment that felt good for everyone involved,” Klein said. “For the innocent person to get compensation for what he went through, and for the government to acknowledge the wrong that had been done and try to do something to right it.”
The third person compensated under the law, Anthony Fitts, received $46,000 in 2020. Fitts spent eight months in prison after he to a 2017 sexual assault in La Plata County. His conviction was vacated after the of assault and testified that the encounter was consensual, court records show.
Since 2019, eight people have filed petitions for compensation, including Lyn-Darr and Fitts, according to records kept by the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, which did not have records of petitions between 2013 and 2018, before Weiser took office. Over those seven years, three petitions were denied, Fitts’ was granted, one petition was withdrawn and three cases are still pending.
That number could soon increase. Stephen Martinez, 58, who was released from prison last week after his murder conviction was overturned in a 1998 shaken baby case, will seek compensation under the act, his attorney, Jeanne Segil, said Tuesday. Martinez, who spent 27 years in prison, may be eligible for about $1.9 million. He has not yet filed a petition.
Weiser has yet to take a position on Lyn-Darr’s petition, but his office opposes compensation in the two other pending cases, brought by Traci Lundstrom and Clayton Hood.
Lundstrom, who killed her husband during a fight in 2009 but saw her conviction vacated in 2023 after prosecutors conceded she acted in self-defense, is seeking $140,000 for the eight months she spent in jail and her years on probation. She previously used the name Traci Housman.
Weiser’s office argued in court filings that Lundstrom is not eligible for compensation because she is not “factually innocent” of the crime, but legally innocent. State law allows compensation only for petitioners who can show they are factually innocent — that they did not do the actions that resulted in their conviction.
“While Ms. Lundstrom alleged, and the District Attorney agreed, that she is legally not guilty of the crime charged because she had a valid claim of self-defense, she does not allege that she is factually innocent, i.e., that she did not participate in the conduct underlying the charges,” a state petition to dismiss reads.
A judge agreed with Weiser’s office and dismissed Lundstrom’s petition in 2025; she is appealing.
Weiser’s office is also opposing a petition for compensation filed by Hood, who was convicted in 2021 of sexual assault on a child and unlawful sexual contact, saw that conviction overturned, and then was acquitted during a second trial. He filed a petition in December seeking $210,000 for the three years he spent incarcerated.
Hood’s first conviction was overturned in 2024 after the Colorado Court of Appeals found that the trial judge wrongly blocked defense attorneys from presenting evidence that another male’s DNA was found on the victim’s body. That DNA did not match Hood. He was acquitted in a second trial in 2025, during which the DNA evidence was presented.
In a response opposing his petition for compensation, attorneys in Weiser’s office argued that Hood’s acquittal does not show actual innocence. They noted that the DNA evidence did not exclude Hood as the perpetrator of the attack and that there is circumstantial evidence that he committed the crime for which he was found not guilty.
“The reversal of Hood’s conviction and subsequent acquittal do not constitute a finding of actual innocence,” the response reads.
