Iris Eytan
Founder & CEO
Iris Eytan is a founding board member and CEO of PEP. As a criminal defense lawyer, she’s represented thousands of defendants and obtained numerous acquittals in high-profile cases and murder trials. She has been a fierce advocate for a just criminal legal system for nearly 30 years.
Iris is a former Deputy State Public Defender, with experience in civil rights and criminal defense litigation at both her own law firm, Eytan Nielsen, and as a partner in another Colorado law firm. Her influence on the criminal justice system is felt at both the state and national level. She committed extensive time to pro bono systemic legal work, including leading a 10-year battle that resulted in a comprehensive federal consent decree that holds the state accountable to people with mental illness in jails deemed incompetent to stand trial.
Iris has received numerous accolades from Best Lawyers in America, Best Law Firms in America and 5280 Magazine, and was featured on the cover of Colorado Super Lawyers Magazine.
In the high-profile case, People v. Barry Morphew, Iris and her team uncovered egregious prosecutorial misconduct that resulted in the dismissal of Mr. Morphew’s first-degree murder charges. It was after this case in 2022, that Iris decided to cease her criminal law practice and found PEP, in the hopes of ending the rampant prosecutorial misconduct she witnessed throughout her career.
Since then, PEP has worked to bring reforms to the criminal justice system. Following an investigation of the prosecutors involved in the Morphew case, former Elected DA Stanley was disbarred and two other DA’s suffered public censure.