A Woodland Park resident has been acquitted of making three false statements to police in a case that the woman’s lawyer says was prosecuted solely because of a prosecutor’s abuse of power.
On the evening of July 24, 2022, Woodland Park resident Samantha Peck went to check on her volunteer petitioners at the local Safeway where they were collecting signatures in an effort to oust some members of the Woodland Park School District RE-2 Board of Trustees.
While at the Safeway, Peck saw an interaction with a woman and a grocery clerk and became concerned that the woman was intoxicated — and potentially driving — soon after Peck learned his volunteers had the same concerns. Peck said that after her volunteers asked her to do so, she called the Woodland Park Police non-emergency line, which she said the police asked her to do earlier if they felt unsafe while collecting signatures.
Peck didn’t know it at the time, but that phone call would spark a nearly year-long criminal case and a trial that ended last week.
In a chat with The Gazette, Peck said nearly two weeks after making the call, she was arrested at her Woodland Park home by police and charged with three counts of misrepresentation, two of which were felonies.
Peck remembers being taken from her home around midnight in front of her three children, the eldest of whom was 14 at the time, and being forced to leave her children alone at home.
“It’s awful to see the fear on your child’s faces,” Peck said, recalling the night she was arrested and taken to Teller County Jail. “It’s awful to be treated like you’re a violent threat to the community for making a call. … That’s not what the foundation of our community should be.”
What Peck says she didn’t know at the time was that the woman she and her volunteers worried about was Katie Illingworth, wife of David Illingworth II, one of three school board members subject to recall at the time and an assistant attorney for Colorado’s 4th Judicial District.
“My issue with the school board was against David Illingworth’s policies and procedures, not against the Illingworth family,” Peck said. “You can dislike what’s going on without hating a person. The only time I saw Ms Illingworth in public was at a school board meeting with 300 people.”
When a Woodland Park officer arrived at Safeway the night Peck made the call, he determined that Katie Illingworth did not appear intoxicated and seemed confused as to why the police would ask her if she was. This interaction can be seen in footage from the body-worn camera of the officer who responded that evening, previously acquired by The Gazette.
Three counts against Peck would follow shortly after the incident: two counts of attempting to influence a public official and one count of falsely reporting a false crime. If Peck had been found guilty at trial of all charges, she could have faced up to six years in prison.
Peck’s attorney, David Lane, a Denver-based civil rights attorney, claimed in an interview with The Gazette that the charges against his client only came about because of Illingworth’s position in the district attorney’s office.
“I was so surprised by the abuse of power here that I agreed to represent Samantha for free, for free, in her criminal charge,” Lane said last week. “David Illingworth is a powerful, well-connected person, and he’s used his position as a powerful, well-connected person to keep this case alive.”
Later that evening when Peck made the report, David Illingworth came to the Woodland Park Police Department and in a conversation that lasted over an hour, according to Lane, discussed what charges the department should bring against Peck for making the call.
“It’s interesting, because there’s a certain point where you cross the line of false reporting to try to influence an official,” Illingworth can be seen saying in part of the video, which was recorded by a Woodland Park police officer’s body camera and provided to The Gazette by Lane. “The question would be if I chased him, I would like to listen to the tape, and if she (Peck) pushes like ‘you gotta go get her, you gotta stop her, she’s a danger’ that’s felony level.”
In the clip, the police officer speaking with David Illingworth can also be heard openly suggesting that Peck called Katie Illingworth exclusively because of David Illingworth’s position on the school board.
In a written statement to The Gazette, the Woodland Park Police Department denied that David Illingworth’s position in the district attorney’s office had anything to do with his choice to press charges against Peck.
“During this investigation, which lasted several days, the officer who worked on this case established probable cause for the charges which were laid prior to any conversation between him and Mr. Illingworth,” Woodland Park Police spokesman Chris Deisler said in the statement. Suggestions to the contrary are simply baseless.
Lane also expressed frustration that his request to appoint a special prosecutor, due to a potential conflict of interest, was denied. Had this request been granted, prosecutors from another judicial district would have presided over the case.
Last week, after three days of trial, a 12-person jury returned with verdicts of not guilty on all three counts in about 30 minutes, Lane said.
Some moments in the trial that stood out for Peck and Lane include when it emerged that Woodland Park police never interviewed the volunteers who had also expressed concerns about Katie Illingworth’s behavior and urged Peck to call the police to report the behavior.
“He (the responding Woodland Park policeman) never even bothered to ask for the volunteers. He never asked those volunteers once in the span of a year,” Lane said. “But he has 75 minutes of David Illingworth walking into his office and advising him on how to turn this misdemeanor charge of false reporting into a felony charge of attempting to influence a public official by deception. It’s outrageous.”
David Illingworth declined to answer specific questions from The Gazette and instead provided the following written statement:
“For me personally, my only connection to this case was that of a husband who feared that my wife might be the victim of misrepresentation. I naturally made myself available to answer questions from the police honestly about any knowledge I had of the facts surrounding the incident, as did any potential witness in this case, and we hired an attorney at our own expense to act as liaison between us and the district attorney’s office.”
Fourth Judiciary spokesman Howard Black provided a written statement to The Gazette regarding Peck’s case:
“The District Attorney’s Office has not addressed the political issues surrounding the Woodland Park School Board and will not be drawn into this debate over a criminal case. Efforts to portray this as a politically motivated prosecution are wrong, as evidenced by strict adherence to the constitutional provisions governing the criminal justice system. David Illingworth serves on the Woodland Park School Board as an independent citizen and not as a representative of the District Attorney’s Office.”
For Peck, there was a sense of validation in the outcome of the trial.
“It was a relief, like that huge weight had just been lifted off of you,” Peck said in tears, describing the moment the jury returned a not guilty verdict.
“I lived an entire year in embarrassment and fear,” Peck said.
Peck, however, said she would not let the experience deter her future efforts to push for positive change in her community and schools.
“If there’s an opportunity to get involved, I will,” Peck said. “I will not allow this terrible experience to keep me from getting involved.”
