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-class 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.

A judge overturned Nancy Smith’s conviction in a child sex abuse case in 2022. Credit: Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

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 sexual 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.

Ms. Smith’s case shocked the working-class city of Lorain three decades ago. Credit: Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times

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 sex 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, sexually 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 sex-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 with her newest great-grandchild at home in Lorain. Credit: Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

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 sex 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 assured 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.”

Read the full article at The New York Times.