Jane Dorotik settles lawsuit that accused San Diego County of wrongly imprisoning her for 20 years

Jane Dorotik, who spent nearly two decades in prison after being convicted of killing her husband in 2000 near their Valley Center home, has settled a federal lawsuit she filed against San Diego County that alleged she was wrongly convicted because of a sloppy investigation and misconduct by law enforcement and prosecutors.

The county will pay Dorotik $499,000 to resolve all claims, according to a county spokesperson. The Board of Supervisors in September approved the settlement, which does not include any admissions of wrongdoing by the defendants, and attorneys for Dorotik and the county filed a joint motion to dismiss the case last week.

U.S. District Judge Cathy Bencivengo officially dismissed the case Nov. 4.

Dorotik was arrested in February 2000 on suspicion of murdering her husband, Robert, whose body was found off a roadside near the couple’s Valley Center ranch. A North County jury convicted her of the killing in 2001, and she was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

Amid ongoing appeals of her conviction, Dorotik was released from prison in April 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and later that year, her conviction was vacated based on new evidence her attorneys had uncovered.

Prosecutors from the county District Attorney’s Office announced they planned to retry Dorotik, resulting in a nearly year-long preliminary hearing throughout much of 2021. But in May 2022, on the day that jury selection was set to begin in the new trial, prosecutors abruptly dropped the case. They wrote in a motion that “the evidence is now insufficient to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Just over a year later, in June 2023, Dorotik filed her lawsuit against the county and the officials she accused of botching the investigation and prosecution.

“This lawsuit is to gain some measure of justice for Jane in the form of compensation for violation of her rights,” Barrett Litt, one of her attorneys, said in a statement at the time the lawsuit was filed.

In the same statement, Litt called the prosecution against his client and the efforts to keep her imprisoned over the years “an egregious abuse of governmental power.” He said that while monetary compensation was “insufficient … for the violation of her rights, it is the only form of compensation provided under American law.”

Dorotik’s attorneys did not respond to messages seeking comment on the settlement. A spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Office declined to comment, as did a spokesperson for the District Attorney’s Office.

Dorotik sent a brief emailed response warning a reporter to “be suspicious of one-sided stories” from the District Attorney’s Office.

Her own suspicion of county prosecutors dates back nearly 26 years to a time shortly after she reported her husband missing the evening of Feb. 13, 2000. She reported that the last time she saw Robert was earlier that day as he prepared to go for a jog. Authorities found Robert’s body early the next morning in a wooded area a few miles from the family’s ranch. Sheriff’s detectives arrested Dorotik three days later.

At the time, Dorotik was a successful executive for a mental-health services company who also raised and trained horses on the family’s ranch. Prosecutors alleged that her motive in the slaying was to avoid paying alimony if the couple divorced. The evidence in the case was mostly circumstantial. Prosecutors argued at trial that Dorotik bludgeoned and strangled her husband in their upstairs bedroom. They said she then moved his body downstairs and outside to a pickup truck before driving a few miles and dumping the corpse.

Dorotik always maintained her innocence, even after a jury in Vista convicted her in 2001.

“I felt strongly, I just could not admit to something I did not do … For my sake, my own family’s sake and the sake of the criminal justice system,” Dorotik said in May 2022 when prosecutors finally dropped her case.

She described the decision to drop her case as a “huge relief,” but also described the previous 22 years as “a torturous journey.”

Dorotik’s fortunes first began to change around 2015, when attorneys at the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent took on her case after more than a dozen years of unsuccessful appeals.

Those lawyers meticulously scrutinized the forensic evidence and helped cast doubt on most aspects of the case, including DNA and blood-spatter evidence, blood analysis and the analysis of tire tracks at the crime scene. The work by the Project for the Innocent team turned up errors in forensic work, revelations about the records of some criminalists in the San Diego County Regional Crime Lab and allegations that the District Attorney’s Office had suppressed evidence over the years.

Among the key findings spurred by the work of Dorotik’s defense team was the lack of her DNA on crucial evidence such as her husband’s clothing, the rope with which he was strangled and scrapings from beneath his fingernails.

Dorotik’s now-settled lawsuit alleged that “her wrongful conviction was the result of police misconduct.” It alleged the misconduct was part of a broader custom and practice among county officials — including those in the Sheriff’s Office, District Attorney’s Office and the Regional Crime Lab — of “deliberate indifference to the due process rights of individuals charged with crimes.”

The suit alleged that sheriff’s investigators and crime lab employees “systematically suppressed and mischaracterized … critical exculpatory evidence, including forensic evidence, that pointed to suspects other than (Dorotik).” It alleged that evidence was not turned over to Dorotik and her attorneys as it should have been.

The suit alleged that sheriff’s investigators prematurely arrested Dorotik and then “constructed (their) entire investigation around finding and fabricating evidence supporting” one detective’s hunch that Dorotik was guilty.

The suit also alleged that two former deputy district attorneys elicited false testimony during Dorotik’s original preliminary hearing and trial, suppressed evidence that should have been disclosed to Dorotik’s defense attorneys and misrepresented evidence to the jury.

The now-settled suit argued that all of those actions amounted to constitutional violations and misconduct that resulted in Dorotik being “wrongfully convicted and incarcerated” for nearly 20 years.