ST. LOUIS (Legal Newsline) - A lack of exculpatory information on a probable cause affidavit could be seen as the reason a man had to spent more than 10 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, a federal appeals court has ruled.
Defendants in Donald Nash's lawsuit in St. Louis federal court lost a recent ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. They were involved in the arrest of Nash 25 years after his girlfriend had been murdered, in 1982.
Spencer was strangled with her own shoelace and shot with a shotgun after a night of drinking and driving. Nash had attempted to keep her from driving while intoxicated, but Spencer left their apartment anyway one night in March 1982.
Her partially nude body was found at an abandoned schoolhouse outside of Salem, Mo. The case went cold but was reopened in 2007, when a mixture of Nash's and Spencer's DNA were found in her fingernails by defendant Ruth Montgomery, a crime lab employee.
Officer Dorothy Taylor came up with the "hair washing theory," which claimed Spencer might have affected the DNA under her fingernails when she washed her hair in a friend's kitchen sink. It was disputed whether she washed her hair before she went home to Nash to change clothes or after.
Officer Henry James Folsom prepared a probable cause affidavit noting the DNA found in Spencer's fingernails. He wrote a mixture of DNA "is often normally the result of a physical struggle" and would have been removed after Spencer washed her hair.
The Seventh Circuit's Feb. 9 ruling says officers "interviewed no other suspects, including the violent sex offender and the man who resided near the ditch where police found Spencer's vehicle."
It also lacked all of the reasons that Nash was never arrested in the first place. They were that Nash didn't own a shotgun, a gunshot residue test given to him a few hours after the murder was negative, he had no marks on his body indicating a struggle, tire tracks where Spencer was found did not match his vehicle and Spencer's vehicle had fingerprints belonging to two other men, while Nash's weren't on it.
In 2009, a jury convicted Nash of capital murder. After 11 years in prison, the Missouri Supreme Court set aside his conviction, and later in 2020 the State dropped its charges because DNA on the shoelace showed Nash wasn't involved.
Nash, who has since passed, filed a civil suit in 2021 against the officers involved in his arrest. They sought immunity, but both courts hearing the issue have now ruled that the lack of information on the 2007 probable cause affidavit could lead a jury to believe his rights were violated.
The district court said once all facts were put in a reconstructed affidavit, it no longer supported probable cause. The Seventh Circuit agreed.
"Given the quantity and gravity of information omitted from the affidavit, a reasonable officer would have understood that omitting this truthful information violated Nash’s constitutional right," says the ruling, authored by Judge R. Lee Smith.