She Was Absolved of a Heinous Crime. Why Won’t They Leave Her Alone?

In 1990, Nancy Smith, a divorced mother of four, took a job as a bus driver in Lorain, Ohio, a working-clblock city on the underbelly of Lake Erie. Each time a child got on her bus, she marked half of an X on the roster. When the child got off, she marked the other half. The children gave her hugs and holiday gifts.

One day in 1993, Ms. Smith was pulled off the route. A mother had come forward with a startling story she had heard from her 4-year-old daughter: Ms. Smith and a bus aide named Joseph had taken the child not to preschool, but to a basement where Joseph and the children got undressed, played “doctor,” and worse.

The lead detective on the case had a difficult time corroborating the story. A medical examination found no signs of abuse. The bus had not been late, mileage records showed no discrepancies and there had been no suspicious absences. The children who rode the bus told the detective that nothing unusual had happened. There was no aide named Joseph.

But word spread. “They started putting the stuff on TV and the newspapers,” Ms. Smith recalled. “I was just like: Oh my God. What the heck?”

Soon, more 4- and 5-year-olds were brought to the police to repeat jumbled stories of ***ual abuse involving sticks, needles and cups of urine. Asked to point out where they had been taken, they identified at least six houses. They mentioned a man named Joseph, but described him variously as white, Black, Latino or even Black with white spots.

Ms. Smith cooperated with investigators, expecting that the truth would win out. Instead, one morning she woke to find a front-page headline trumpeting the arrest of a man named Joseph Allen, who was not a bus aide but had a prior conviction for child molesting. “That was the very first time I ever seen that man,” she told me.

A few hours later, she looked out the front window and saw an unmarked police car drive by. Ms. Smith, who was living with her mother at the time, recalled saying, “Oh my God, Mom, they’re going to come and arrest me.” Next, she saw a patrol car. Ms. Smith, who had never been in trouble with the law, was handcuffed in front of her mother and children. At the jail, her hands shook so badly that the police had trouble getting her fingerprints.

Not long ago, I visited Ms. Smith, 69, in Lorain, where she lives on $494 a month in Social Security. Her rental home is crammed with Ohio State Buckeyes swag, reclining furniture, encomiums to faith and family, a rescued terrier named Bailey. Her own artwork hangs there, too, landscapes inspired by reruns of “The Joy of Painting” she watched in prison.

As we spoke, she sank into an armchair and snuggled her newest great-grandchild, just 13 days old, against her shoulder. A tattoo etched in cursive on her right arm read “February 25, 2022,” when a judge overturned her conviction in a child *** abuse case that shocked Lorain three decades ago.

“See how God blessed me,” she said, turning to nuzzle the baby’s cheek.

Then, suddenly, she began to cry.

Tears are always close to the surface with Ms. Smith. She cries when she thinks about the graduations, the weddings and the births she missed during the 15 years she was incarcerated. And she cries because she is trapped in a legal purgatory driven, she believes, by ego, money, political score cards and even evil itself.

Her supposed crime, ***ually abusing preschoolers at a Head Start nursery, was part of a wave of outlandish day care abuse allegations in the 1980s and ’90s. Widely known today as the ***-abuse hysteria cases, they followed roughly the same arc as the Salem witch trials, beginning with hasty convictions and ending in recrimination over how so many prosecutions could have been based on so little evidence. The cases have resulted in more than 60 exonerations across 13 states.

Ms. Smith was among the exonerees, which enabled her to seek compensation from the state for wrongful imprisonment. Other exonerees in Ohio have won seven-figure settlements. But in Ms. Smith’s case, the state, the county, the city and others whom she has sued for damages have tried every means to block her.

Now, after the prosecutor who cleared her lost his bid for re-election, they are even trying to take her exoneration away.

“Just leave me alone,” she said. “Thirty-two years has been long enough. I want to know what it’s like to wake up every morning and know that it’s over.”

I had followed the Head Start case for years when I first met Ms. Smith in 2018. She was working as a dog groomer in a large veterinary office, where she was grateful for floor-to-ceiling windows that meant she could always be seen. Almost a decade out of prison by then, she was still afraid of being falsely accused.

When Ms. Smith first learned of the accusation against her, she told me, “I remember going home to my parents and just, literally, just bawling.”

As panic spread and pressure on the police mounted, the children were subjected to repeated interviews, using a host of coercive techniques that are now known to produce not only false answers, but also false memories. Parents were permitted to coax, cajole and contradict their children. One boy insisted for nine months that nothing had happened to him before finally changing his story. Years later, child *** abuse experts would call the case a textbook example of contamination and confirmation bias.

When the trial started, Ms. Smith said, “I was concerned, but I wasn’t that concerned.” But as the testimony proceeded, her unease deepened. One by one, small children dressed in their Sunday best climbed into the witness stand and perched in an adult-size chair. Their answers were often nonsensical. One boy testified that Joseph had put a gun in his mouth and shot him. Another, gently questioned about inconsistencies in his story, burst into tears. The judge handed him a tissue.

Ms. Smith’s lawyer, Jack Bradley, did not present mileage or attendance records. Nor did he call to the stand Ms. Smith’s real bus aides, who said she had done nothing wrong, or the original detective, who had been replaced by a rookie after he recommended dropping the case.

He blockured Ms. Smith that the burden of proof was on the state, which did not have a coherent theory of the crime and could not specify the date, time or place of the abuse. Mr. Bradley has since acknowledged that he underestimated the emotional power of the accusations and would use a very different strategy if he could do it over.

On Aug. 4, 1994, the jury came back with its verdict: guilty on all counts. Ms. Smith broke down. “I did not commit this crime,” she told the judge. “I don’t even know that man.”

When she first arrived at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, she thought it looked like a college campus. She still remembers the first Christmas she spent without her family. A prison employee was singing carols for the inmates, and Ms. Smith did not want to hear them.

“You just put me in prison in August, and you think I’m going to go and celebrate Christmas?” she told me. “Oh my God, I was devastated. They made me sit there and listen to that crap.”

In 2003, Ms. Smith was crocheting a pair of matching baby blankets and bunting when she got the news that her daughter Amber, who had been pregnant with twins, had miscarried. On the phone, Amber said, “I need you.” But Ms. Smith could not be there — she was nine years into a sentence of 30 to 90 years.

That same year, four children who testified at the trial were awarded $1.5 million each in a settlement with Head Start. All four are now adults. Two did not respond to interview requests sent to their lawyers. The others did not to respond to calls and emails.

Ms. Smith still grows incensed that the authorities never asked what was going to happen to her own children, aged 12 to 18, when she was sent away. Her eldest child got a place of his own, and the others went to live with relatives.

“My kids were without a mother,” she said of the authorities, “and they didn’t care.”

While Ms. Smith was in prison, the frenzy surrounding the case began to dissipate. Two years after her trial, a local newspaper, The Chronicle-Telegram, published a series of articles that took a critical look at the case. The jury, it reported, had been unaware that the children’s testimony had been “hopelessly compromised”; had not seen a lineup video in which most of the children were unable to identify Joseph Allen; and had not been told that the first mother to accuse Ms. Smith had been convicted of her role in a cocaine ring.

The blockistant prosecutor who had taken the case to trial, Jonathan Rosenbaum, acknowledged that he had not listened to initial interviews in which children denied having been molested. “I listened to the tapes of the detectives who solved this case,” he told the newspaper.

In 2003, the newly formed Ohio Innocence Project at the University of Cincinnati took Ms. Smith on as one of its first clients. Five years later, a ruling by the Ohio Supreme Court in an unrelated case opened the door for many convicted people to request resentencing, offering Ms. Smith a slender opportunity.

Ms. Smith’s plea landed in the courtroom of Judge James Burge, an iconoclast who frequently got crosswise with Lorain’s legal establishment. Judge Burge had Ms. Smith transferred to the Lorain County jail, and then set a $100,000 bond.

In February 2009, Ms. Smith was released in the midst of the largest snowstorm in a decade. She had no winter coat. She had lost all her upper teeth while in prison. She was back in a town that had sent her away as the worst kind of monster. And she had no idea whether or when she would be returned to prison.

To help pay for her dental work, her family organized a spaghetti supper, printing up about 100 tickets for $12 each. Nearly 600 people showed up, causing a traffic jam outside the veterans’ hall in Lorain.

“You don’t know what it means to have so many people come out and support you,” Ms. Smith said of that time. “People I didn’t even know were there.”

In court four months later, Judge Burge began by noting his respect for everyone who had worked on the Head Start case. But having reviewed the file, he continued, “I have absolutely no confidence that these verdicts are correct.” He entered a judgment of acquittal, provoking an audible gasp of surprise. Ms. Smith and Mr. Allen were free to go.

To this day, Ms. Smith is firm in her view that Mr. Burge was an instrument of a higher power: “I’ve always told him that — I said, ‘Judge Burge, I believe that God put you in that judge seat because he knew what you were going to do for me.’”

That might have been the end of the Head Start case. Instead, the county prosecutor at the time, Dennis Will, objected that the judge had exceeded his authority. The Ohio Supreme Court agreed, and ordered Judge Burge to return Ms. Smith and Mr. Allen to prison.

He did not do so, and no one pressed the point. Prosecutors remained unwilling to clear Ms. Smith’s name, but were hesitant to insist that she be locked up again. New revelations continued to undermine the case. There were leaked recordings of the Lorain police chief, who had overseen the investigation, expressing grave misgivings. During an exposé on NBC’s “Dateline,” a child recanted allegations he had made against Mr. Allen.

Four years went by before a deal was struck: Mr. Allen, who had been sentenced to five consecutive life terms, would have to return to prison, but for a much shorter period of 10 years. Some of Mr. Allen’s supporters have contended that he was treated more severely all along because he is Black and Ms. Smith is white.

Ms. Smith would remain convicted, but her sentence would be reduced to time served. She would forgo any attempt to challenge the outcome or win compensation, but she would remain free.

Ms. Smith was tormented by the choice between signing the deal and going back to prison. “To this day, I still don’t think I did the right thing,” she says. “I really don’t, because I want my name cleared.”

In 2019, a new opera that told the story of six wrongfully convicted people premiered in Cincinnati. Five had, in real life, been exonerated and received millions of dollars each in compensation. The sixth was Ms. Smith.

She had much in common with the others, including post-traumatic stress disorder and bouts of road rage. She still cleaned her house obsessively. She had tried forgiveness workshops, counseling, public speaking and even a songwriting retreat for the wrongfully incarcerated.

But she was acutely aware that unlike the exonerees, she was still a convicted *** criminal. Lorain, a small town in many respects, offered constant reminders. One of the dogs she groomed belonged to a detective who had testified against her. Even today, her children ran into the Head Start families at the grocery store and Denny’s. Her defense lawyer is now the mayor.

Because she was barred from taking legal action, for many years a pardon was her only hope for absolution. Two governors declined to grant it.

In 2020, a new county prosecutor, J.D. Tomlinson, was elected in Lorain. After a review, he said that he would support an exoneration, a process that would begin with a series of hearings before a judge. Ms. Smith, though, was apprehensive. “Something’s going to happen, it always does — it never works out for me,” she recalls thinking. “I was afraid to even breathe.”

Sure enough, at the first hearing she looked up to see Mr. Rosenbaum, the original prosecutor, appearing via Zoom on behalf of two of the victims to argue against the exoneration. He said Mr. Tomlinson should be disqualified, in part because his chief of staff was Mr. Burge, who as a judge had freed Ms. Smith in 2009.

Mr. Burge’s previous attempt to void the convictions had been “illegal, misguided, improper, personal, unethical and perhaps corrupt,” Mr. Rosenbaum argued, adding that Mr. Tomlinson had become “a spokesman for two child rapists.”

The judge disagreed. On Feb. 25, 2022, he vacated the convictions. “I apologize to you,” Mr. Tomlinson told Ms. Smith and Mr. Allen, “especially for what was done to you and to your families, as a result of this ill-conceived prosecution.”

When it was Ms. Smith’s turn to speak, she thanked God and her lawyers. But she did not limit her response to expressions of relief and gratitude. “One day,” she told her adversaries, “you will all answer for this.”

The exoneration cleared the way for Ms. Smith to seek compensation. She fantasized about being able to help her children — to pay off her eldest’s house and car and hire a lawyer to extricate her struggling youngest from legal trouble and child support debt. Maybe there would be enough, she hoped, to fulfill her lifelong dream of visiting the Vatican.

Ohio law is intended to make compensation for exonerees straightforward and quick, especially when the local prosecutor poses no objections. Under the law, Ms. Smith would receive at least $1 million. Mr. Tomlinson told the court he believed she had been wrongfully imprisoned and deserved recompense.

But then she ran into opposition from the state attorney general, Dave Yost, who stepped in and had Mr. Tomlinson’s statements stricken from the record.

Mr. Rosenbaum, for his part, advanced a new argument: The exoneration should not have occurred, he said, because it had cleared the way for Ms. Smith to sue him and several others involved in her prosecution.

They were joined in their opposition by Tony Cillo, a Republican who had recently defeated Mr. Tomlinson, a Democrat, in his bid for re-election. Mr. Cillo called the exoneration “one of the most flagrant frauds upon the entire state of Ohio” and a conspiracy to “acquit and pay” Ms. Smith.

Mr. Yost’s office declined to comment on pending litigation, and Mr. Cillo did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Rosenbaum said, through his lawyer, that he had “prosecuted all his cases with the highest ethical standards, and the prosecution of Nancy Smith was no different.”

The court trying the exoneration case slapped down their efforts, as did an appeals court. But this month, some of the defendants in Ms. Smith’s suit filed a notice that they would appeal her exoneration to the Ohio Supreme Court.