Dunes Runner, I am not quite sure why you are defending this woman. While I don't see why her course cutting necessitates drug testing as Sir Walter suggests, the evidence against her with respect to cutting the course seems fairly clear, and the fact that she tried to cover it up also seems fairly clear.
My sense is that you are not disputing the fact that she cut the course, but rather whether the impact of that course cutting is somewhat exaggerated. I would say that while the impact is somewhat hard to determine, how others who were near her throughout the race ended up relative to her is a pretty good, if imperfect, indicator of the impact of the course cutting. I am also going to guess that the distance that she cut is a bit understated. I think people are basing the 1/4 mile estimate on the fact that her GPS data shows her being close to 12.9 miles for her run. As we all know, it isn't reasonable to expect GPS data to match up with actual course distance, and it is reasonable to expect that a GPS watch would show a total distance of between 13.2-13.3 for a half marathon on a certified course. So we could be talking about something like a third or close to a half mile being cut off.
As to whether the course cutting was intentional or inadvertent, that is also hard to say without having been there, but the best evidence that we have seems to be that others who were there are saying it would be pretty hard to accidentally go of course where she went off course. While some might argue that this is a "he said/she said" situation, I would say that the "she" in this situation has fairly low credibility based on (1) her past demonstration of a willingness to cut (figurative) corners based on her doping sanction, (2) her claiming to have run the hills that she cut off of the course in her social media posts, (3) her pro-actively telling others she passed them on the course when she had not passed them because she had cut the course. That doesn't even require us to rely upon additional facts like her claiming to have told the RD about her mistake or her having asked a race official what to do while off of the course.
In any event, intentional or not, it seems pretty clear that she tried to cover up her course cutting.
Why would you go out of your way to defend a person who has done this?