Justice and doubt

Doubt has suffused the Head Start child-abuse case since it began in 1993. Doubt about the timeline. Doubt about the way the alleged victims were interviewed. Doubt about the motives of a parent. Doubt about how the case was handled in court. Doubt about whether the awful crimes Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen were accused of even happened. So overwhelming has the doubt become that the Lorain County Prosecutor's Office last week dropped the case against them. Winning a conviction, which the Prosecutor's Office did in 1994 under different leadership, is not about eliminating all doubt. Prosecutors must prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. Twelve jurors concluded they had no reasonable doubt about the guilt of Smith and Allen. The pair, who insisted they had never met before and denied molesting children on Smith's Head Start bus route, were convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. The 9th District Court of Appeals upheld Smith and Allen's convictions, and the Ohio Supreme Court refused to take up the case. Former Assistant County Prosecutor Jonathan Rosenbaum has argued that those and other reviews over the years have never found reason to doubt the convictions. History, however, is replete with cases in which court after court has upheld convictions eventually determined to be erroneous. Pursuing such matters is the reason for the existence of the Ohio Innocence Project, which worked on the Head Start case. Through it all, Smith and Allen maintained their innocence. Smith's refusal to admit her guilt complicated her efforts to win parole, which for many raised even more doubt. The case gained renewed interest in 2009 when then-Lorain County Common Pleas Judge James Burge reviewed it and concluded that Smith and Allen had been wrongly convicted. He tossed their convictions, which higher courts eventually reinstated. Nevertheless, it was enough to prompt prosecutors to cut a deal with Smith and Allen in 2013. Smith ended up being freed, while Allen was returned to prison. That's where the case sat for years until J.D. Tomlinson was elected county prosecutor in 2020 and undertook a review of it. He concluded that there was sufficient evidence to support Smith and Allen's bid for a new trial. He then went even further, saying he would dismiss it if a new trial were granted. That upset Rosenbaum and at least two of the alleged victims, who argued that the convictions should stand. They are certainly entitled to their views, which we doubt will ever change, but they aren't the ones whose job it was to make the decision. That responsibility fell to county Common Pleas Judge Chris Cook, who freed Allen on bond in December while he considered the request for a new trial. Among the new evidence was an affidavit from the original Lorain police investigator assigned to the case, who was removed after concluding no crime had occurred. There also was an affidavit from the brother of one of the alleged victims, who insisted that his mother had made up the allegations. Cook took that evidence seriously, saying that there were "sinister manipulations orchestrated" for the mother's "own financial gain." He also considered evidence dealing with how the children were interviewed and the moral panic over child abuse at day-care centers that swept the nation in the 1990s. Many of the convictions from that era were eventually thrown out, leading to more doubt in the Head Start case. The culmination of all that "compelling" evidence, as Cook put it, led him to the conclusion that the pair deserved a new trial. Tomlinson then dismissed the case, saying that Smith and Allen were innocent. He apologized for what he described as an "ill-conceived prosecution." It is important to note that Cook said he didn't believe Rosenbaum or other prosecutors over the years who fought to uphold the convictions "acted with malice or vendetta." Smith certainly didn't seem to view it that way, saying that her prosecution had been an act of "evil." She and Allen could still ask a judge to rule that they were "actually innocent" of the charges against them, which would allow them to seek compensation for wrongful imprisonment. Smith has said that was a question for "another day." No matter what Cook and Tomlinson had decided, some people were always going to doubt whether justice was done in the case. We are satisfied that both men approached it fairly, reviewed the evidence carefully and reached a just conclusion.