ST. LOUIS - A Missouri man wants payback after he spent 12 years in prison for a murder he says he didn't commit.
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 the U.S. District Court for Eastern Missouri on April 28.
Nash served 12 years in prison for Spencer's murder after he was found guilty due to the presence of his DNA under the victim's fingernails.
The Missouri Supreme Court overturned his conviction more than a decade after he was sentenced to prison.
Nash's lawyers argued that it is not uncommon for people living in the same household to have their partner's DNA under their fingernails, and new technology after Nash's conviction found male DNA on the shoestring that strangled Spencer that did not match Nash.
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.
The defendants are charged with unlawful arrest and detention, fabrication of evidence, failure to investigate, withholding exculpatory evidence, violations of rights of access to courts, conspiracy, violation of the right to familial and martial associations, false arrest, malicious prosecution, abuse of process, intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, civil conspiracy and loss of consortium.
Nash is represented by Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP of St. Louis.