ST. LOUIS (Legal Newsline) – A man found to have been wrongly convicted of killing his girlfriend who spent 12 years in jail can not only sue one of the Missouri State Highway Patrollers who investigated the crime, he can also seek punitive damages.
Plaintiff Donald Nash was arrested, detained, prosecuted and convicted of capital murder in the 1982 killing of his live-in girlfriend, Judy Spencer. He filed suit in St. Louis federal court on April 28, having been released after 12 years in jail.
Nash blames several people for his wrongful conviction, including former Missouri State Highway Patrol employees James Folsom, Scott Mertens and Dorothy Taylor, and former MSHP Crime Lab employee Ruth Montgomery, all of whom he says either manipulated evidence or lied on the stand in Nash's trial.
On Oct. 18, Judge Jean Hamilton refused to dismiss claims against Folsom and allowed Nash to pursue punitive damages.
“(T)he Court agrees with Plaintiffs that the (State Legal Expense Fund) is merely a voluntary assumption of legal and monetary obligations that affords state employees protection from personal liability for damages; it does not bar the underlying claims themselves,” Hamilton wrote.
“To receive such immunity from suit, Defendant Folsom would have to invoke the defense of official immunity, which he has not done.”
In 1982, Nash’s live-in girlfriend Judy Spencer went missing during a night that started with her drinking at a friend’s apartment and included a fight with Nash over whether she should drive. She left alone to visit bars in a nearby town.
But Nash could not locate her that night. She was found the next day by two farmers at an abandoned schoolhouse outside Salem.
Spencer was choked with her own shoelace and shot in the neck with a shotgun. Her car was found in a ditch many miles away.
No physical evidence or eyewitness testimony placed Spencer anywhere near either site. A gunshot residue test was negative, and investigators found fingerprints on the car belonging to a violent sex offender and a man who lived next to the ditch. Nash’s fingerprints were not found in her car.
No arrest was made for more than 25 years, after Spencer’s sister asked the Missouri State Highway Patrol to test Spencer’s fingernails for DNA. Results showed Nash’s DNA, investigators said.
He was charged with capital murder. Prosecutors ignored the fact Spencer was Nash’s live-in girlfriend when explaining the DNA and instead argued Spencer had washed her hair earlier that night, which would have scrubbed her fingernails clean.
Folsom personally drafted and filed a probable cause affidavit that Nash said contained reckless and malicious assertions to obtain an arrest warrant. He allegedly claimed Nash had engaged in suspicious behavior.
Nash was convicted in 2009, but the Missouri Supreme Court set his conviction aside in 2020, thanks to a 217-page report issued by a special master on Nash’s innocence.
When DNA testing on the shoelace did not link Nash to it, the State dismissed its charges. The lawsuit followed on April 28.
The State Legal Expense Fund provides financial support for state officers who face a civil judgment over their official duties. Folsom argued Nash should have made his claim for compensation to the SLEF, not the federal court.
Judge Hamilton ruled otherwise, noting Nash could be keeping Folsom from pleading official immunity because that only protects officials if they did not act with malice.
Hamilton added the SLEF does not preclude the claim for punitive damages, but Nash’s lawyers successfully argued the SLEF provides funds for “any amount.”