Court rejects Lorain County Prosecutor's appeal in Head Start child sexual abuse case

The Ninth District Court of Appeals has rejected Lorain County Prosecutor Tony Cillo's request to overrule a judge who rejected his attempt to overturn the exonerations of Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen in the Head Start child sexual abuse case. Judges Jill Flagg Lanzinger, Betty Sutton and Scot Stevenson ruled against Cillo on May 20. He didn't have the right to appeal visiting Judge Janet Burnside's order and his appeal didn't comply with appellate rules, Lanzinger wrote. Cillo said Thursday that it was a technical finding rather than one made on the merits of his arguments. He said he was weighing his legal options. "It's always an uphill battle in a criminal case when you're the appellant," Cillo said. Asked for comment, Mark Godsey, director of the Ohio Innocence Project at the University of Cincinnati College of Law and one of Smith's attorneys, said in an email that the appeals court's ruling was "self-explanatory." Cillo had asked Burnside to vacate rulings that exonerated Smith and Allen of sexually abusing children in the mid-1990s. He had alleged they were only exonerated due to "wide-ranging fraud" by former elected Lorain County prosecutor J.D. Tomlinson and his staff.Tomlinson, a one-term Democrat who preceded Cillo in office, denied the allegation. Burnside rejected Cillo's arguments, finding no fraud was involved and that Cillo was too late to appeal. Cillo appealed that ruling. "Another court. Another failed attempt," Tomlinson said in a statement to The Chronicle-Telegram on Thursday. Cillo's "effort to distort the truth and undermine justice has once again been rejected," Tomlinson wrote. "Judge Burnside said it best, describing Prosecutor Cillo's claim that Jim Burge and I committed fraud while helping exonerate two innocent people as nothing more than 'an empty, insulting label.' "The justice system often does a poor job of holding accountable those who traffic in false accusations," Tomlinson wrote. "But false accusations must eventually withstand scrutiny. In this case, they did not. "My sincere congratulations to Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen — the true victims in all of this," he wrote. "They lost a combined 40 years of their lives in prison for crimes that never occurred. Maybe this nightmare is finally nearing its end. Today was a good day for justice." Allen and Smith were convicted in 1995 of sexually abusing children who rode the Head Start bus Smith drove. Both were sentenced to long prison terms. They maintained their innocence, alleging that evidence was withheld from the jury and that the victims were coached by parents and Lorain police. All their state and federal appeals were denied. Tomlinson reexamined the case after he was elected prosecutor in 2020. He got Judge Chris Cook to dismiss the charges in early 2022. A lawsuit Smith filed in 2024 accusing Lorain County, the city of Lorain and multiple other defendants of wrongful conviction is pending in federal court. Contact Dave O'Brien at (440) 329-7129 or dobrien@chroniclet.com.