An El Paso County judge has thrown out the murder convictions for a Colorado Springs woman in the deaths of her three children in a house fire more than 20 years ago.
District Court Senior Judge Michael Mullins vacated Deborah Nicholls’ convictions in a written order last weekend, nearly four months after he found that prosecutors wrongly kept secret evidence that cast doubt on Nicholls’ guilt during her original jury trial.
Nicholls was convicted in 2008 of first-degree murder in the deaths of her three children, who died when the family’s house caught fire in the middle of the night on March 7, 2003.
Those convictions were erased Saturday.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Nicholls’ attorney, Janene McCabe, said Thursday.
Nicholls, who now stands accused but not convicted of the crimes, will be transferred to the El Paso County jail, and be considered for release on bail while an appeal from the Fourth Judicial District Attorney’s Office is pending. Prosecutors are challenging the judge’s findings that they violated evidence rules by keeping exculpatory evidence secret.
“This office will continue to fight for justice for the three children who lost their lives in 2003,” Fourth Judicial District Attorney Michael Allen said in a statement. “We will diligently defend the original verdicts, and we are prepared to retry the case, if deemed necessary by the Court of Appeals.”
Nicholls has long maintained her innocence in the fire that killed her children, Jay, 11, Sophia, 5, and Sierra, 3. She began her most recent push to overturn her convictions in 2022, with the backing of the Korey Wise Innocence Project at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Prosecutors argued during the parents’ separate jury trials that Deborah and Tim Nicholls killed their children in an attempt to collect insurance money to fund their methamphetamine addiction. The parents were accused of spreading a highly flammable cleaning fluid around the house — and on their children’s pajamas — and then intentionally setting the home on fire.
Tim Nicholls allegedly confessed the murder plot to another prisoner while awaiting trial, and that man then became an informant and a key witness for the prosecution. Deborah Nicholls was not home when the fire started; her husband escaped the blaze with burns and injuries after jumping out a second-story window.
Prosecutors alleged Deborah Nicholls masterminded the plot while her husband carried it out and set the fire. She has suggested she may have left candles burning unattended in the home. Deborah’s murder convictions were upheld by the Colorado Supreme Court in 2017.
During Deborah Nicholls’ jury trial, prosecutors relied heavily on findings from one Colorado Bureau of Investigation scientist who concluded that chemical testing results were consistent with an accelerant being used in the deadly fire.
But the district attorneys kept secret a second opinion from another CBI scientist who found that the testing did not show the presence of an accelerant. That second scientist also agreed with a defense expert that some testing had been contaminated, Mullins wrote in an April 28 order. The judge found the second opinion undermined the core of the prosecution’s case.
“Disclosure of the suppressed evidence would have enabled the defense to challenge the validity and weight of laboratory findings, potentially precluding their admission or, at a minimum, undermining their credibility,” Mullins wrote in a 20-page order overturning the convictions. “This, in turn, would have weakened the prosecution’s expert testimony regarding the presence of accelerants and diminished the perceived reliability of corroborating witnesses. … As a result, the prosecution’s case would have been destabilized, undermining its overall credibility.”
Prosecutors in Allen’s office argued that the second CBI scientistap opinion — provided to the prosecution in the form of notes as they prepared for trial — was work product that did not have to be turned over to the defense under Colorado discovery rules, which govern evidence sharing in criminal cases.
Mullins rejected that argument on the grounds that exculpatory information must always be shared.
On Thursday, McCabe said Nicholls is relieved by the ruling but frustrated by how long it took.
“Her frustration is, why do prosecutors get to do this?” McCabe said. “Why do prosecutors get to hide evidence and have no repercussions against them? It was the crux of the case, whether an accelerant was used to start the fire. And when the DAs had bad evidence that they knew cut against their theory, they just hid it.”
The prosecutors on the original case were Amy Folsom and Jeff Lindsey. Lindsey is now the elected DA in the 11th Judicial District, which was recently sanctioned for discovery violations. He declined to comment Thursday.
Kate Singh, a spokeswoman for Allen, said in a statement that the original prosecution was handled by different people than those who run the office now.
“Since then, the office has experienced significant changes in leadership, personnel, policies, training and technology,” the statement read. “Discovery practices have also evolved substantially, and prosecutors today receive training on the sophisticated technologies and processes required to meet modern discovery obligations.”
The statement reiterated that prosecutors disagree with Mullins’ finding of a discovery violation.
Tim Nicholls’ convictions were not affected by the ruling in Deborah Nicholls’ case, and he remains imprisoned on a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. He is pursuing similar innocence claims, his attorney, Gail Johnson, said Thursday.
“Like his former wife Deb Nicholls, our client Tim Nicholls is innocent of arson and murder,” she said in a statement. “He loved his children, and he suffered significant injuries when he went upstairs in the burning house to try to save them from the tragic accidental house fire. Similar to what happened in Deb’s case, the district attorney’s office hid favorable evidence from Tim’s counsel that contradicts the prosecution theory that the fire was intentionally set.”
Deborah Nicholls is scheduled to return to court Aug. 20. After her bail is decided, the case will be on hold in the district court while the DA’s appeal is pending. The Colorado Court of Appeals could either uphold Mullins’ decision to vacate the convictions or reverse it and reinstate them.
