LESLIE, Mo. — Pastor Tom Rudloff had barely begun his eulogy for Doc Nash when he had to pause and collect himself. Every pew at the Evergreen Baptist Church, about 60 miles southwest of ºüÀêÊÓƵ, was full. A man in the second row got up and handed Rudloff a tissue.
“That’s normally the pastor’s job,†he said, before pausing and finding his voice again. “I didn’t know Doc long, but I loved that man.â€
A lot of people loved Donald “Doc†Nash. His three attorneys — Charlie Weiss, Jonathan Potts and Stephen Snodgrass — drove in from ºüÀêÊÓƵ for the service. They’re the ones who fought for Nash’s freedom after he spent 12 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.
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Nash’s old prison chaplain, who had been visiting him since 2007, also was there. So was Nash’s wife, Theresa, and his daughter, Diana. And so were many of the people he went to church with over the last couple of years, after he walked out of the Bonne Terre prison as inmates and guards cheered him on.
“Doc knew the true meaning of freedom,†Rudloff said.
Nash died Jan. 28 after a battle with pneumonia brought on by COVID-19. .
It’s ironic, Potts told me as we gathered at the church near where Nash lived. In 2020, a special master in Nash’s case, St. Charles County Circuit Court Judge Richard J. Zerr, issued a damning 222-page report calling Nash’s prosecution a “miscarriage†of justice. In the days after, Potts and his fellow attorneys were still fighting with the state to get Nash out of the prison, which had become a hotbed of COVID-19.
They succeeded, and eventually the local prosecutor relented on his attempts to re-prosecute Nash. A key piece of evidence in the case was retested, and the DNA of two different men was found on it. Nash’s long battle to prove his innocence was over. He was able to sit on a porch with his wife and enjoy the peace and quiet in rural Beaufort. But for repayment of his 12 years in prison, he was free for only two years before he died.
It doesn’t seem fair. And yet, Nash is one of the lucky ones. His family asked that, in lieu of flowers, people send donations to the , which has helped exonerate dozens of wrongfully convicted prisoners in Missouri. It's a long slog to get an innocent man out of prison, with the system often fighting justice every step of the way.Â
I first heard about Nash from Josh Kezer, the southeast Missouri man whose wrongful murder conviction was overturned in 2009. Lately, Kezer has been advocating for inmates in Missouri prisons whom he believes are innocent, including Leonard “Raheem†Taylor, who is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Tuesday.
There are some similarities in the Nash and Taylor cases. Both men were accused of killing girlfriends despite a lack of physical evidence tying them to the crimes. Junk science and a rush to judgment convicted Nash, while Taylor’s attorneys point to a questionable last-minute change in the medical examiner’s testimony on time of death.
On the day after Nash died, attorneys for the Midwest Innocence Project asked Gov. Mike Parson to order a Board of Inquiry into Taylor’s conviction. It’s a rarely used process that, like the special master appointment in Nash’s case, could create an opportunity for a judge to take a look at the full body of evidence and make sure an innocent man isn’t put to death.
That’s similar to a decision made last month in Oklahoma, where Attorney General Gentner Drummond (a Republican, like Parson) appointed a special counsel of Richard Glossip. If deep-red Oklahoma can take a pause on a death penalty case so as not to make the ultimate mistake, why not deep-red Missouri?
I didn’t plan to write about Taylor’s case. In Missouri, the rush to use the power of the state to kill other human beings is a seemingly unmovable force — so much so that the Missouri Supreme Court was chastised by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson last year when it ignored state law and bypassed a required hearing before killing Kevin Johnson. Why bother writing about Taylor, I thought, when the system often seems to turn a blind eye to justice?
Then Doc Nash died. Without a hearing before a special master, he never would have walked out of prison. He might not have had the opportunity to fill a church with people who got to know and love him in his final years. God loves us for who we are, not who we were, Rudloff told Nash’s friends and family.
That’s grace, a concept too often missing in Missouri’s courts.
Even after special master finds "miscarriage" of justice, Dent County prosecutor refiles murder charge.
Special master report says evidence is clear that Donald 'Doc' Nash should never have been convicted of murder.Â